Manual cutter, guillotine, unwinder — or core stripper?

Stripping a reel with a knife is the default in most plants because it needs no investment. What it needs instead is time and people: an operator cutting through layer after layer of tightly wound film, paper or laminate, reel after reel, for as long as the pile lasts. It is a long process, it consumes labour the plant needs elsewhere, and it is slow by construction.

It is also dangerous. A blade pulled against a compact, resistant wound material is one of the classic causes of cutting injuries in converting plants — and the deeper the operator goes, the closer the blade gets to the core.

And there is the quality problem: nothing guarantees the core is not damaged. Cut too deep and the tube is scored, delaminated or perforated, and it can no longer be wound on again. So you pay in labour and in risk, and you may still lose the core.

Verdict: the manual cutter is a legitimate answer only in exceptional cases — a few reels, with little material left on them. It is not a method for a plant that generates end-of-life reels every week.

A guillotine makes economic sense in one situation: many reels, of large diameter. Below that threshold it is a heavy answer to a small question.

The real problems begin with the installation. A guillotine needs a large area — the machine plus a safety perimeter, because the tool is inherently dangerous and must be surrounded by fencing, interlocks and procedures. And the reels have to get there: handling and positioning heavy reels on a guillotine is neither simple nor safe, and it usually means a forklift or a crane working inside the same restricted area.

Then there is what comes out. The guillotine cuts through the material and the core at the same time: it splits the wound material and it smashes the tube. Material and core fragments end up mixed, and once they are mixed separating them cleanly is difficult. What you hand to the recycler is no longer a pure fraction — harder to recycle, worth less, and in the worst case not recyclable at all.

Verdict: the guillotine buys speed and pays for it with floor space, safety management, and the loss of both assets — the reusable core and the pure material.

The unwinder is the honest competitor. It does the one thing the guillotine cannot: it saves the tube, because it never cuts through it. If your priority is core reuse, an unwinder gets you there.

The problem is the length of the process. Unwinding the entire residual length of material takes as long as it takes — there is no shortcut. There are complete systems that combine unwinding with in-line re-granulation of the material, and they work well; but they only make sense in dedicated spaces and at very large volumes. Most converters have neither the hall nor the tonnage to justify them.

Verdict: the right principle, at the wrong speed and the wrong scale for most plants. A core stripper delivers the same two clean fractions — intact core, pure material — in less space and less time.

A core stripper does not cut through the reel. It cuts the wound material lengthways and stops before the core: the material opens and peels off, the tube is released whole. Two clean outputs from one cycle:

• The core, 100% intact — back into production or back to the supplier, instead of being bought again.
• The material, as a single-material fraction — no cardboard fragments, no mixed stream, so it enters its own recycling loop and keeps its value.

RECYCLO does it at 2,500 kg/h on soft plastics (1,300 kg/h on aluminium), on cores from 76-304 mm, in a footprint of 2,644 x 824 mm — a fraction of a guillotine station or an unwinding line. It is fully guarded and CE-compliant: the operator interacts with a touch screen and a loading clamp, never with an exposed blade. The machine is protected by patent.

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