Pollini Group has 250 employees at six sites in Northern Italy and a total production area of 45 000 square metres. Owned by the Pollini family for three generations, the group specialises in the recycling of end-of-life vehicles and maximising the recovery of components using the best available technologies, such as the Panizzolo Recycling Systems Mega 1100 series hammermill.
Matteo: ‘Our companies were founded by our grandfather Lorenzo some 40 years ago. Later the management passed to our parents and then to us, the third generation of this family business. Today, Giacomo presides over Pollini Lorenzo & Sons while I manage Pollini Srl, which deals with scrap disposal and recycling in our dedicated scrap treatment plant.
Of the input material, 80% comes from Giacomo’s operation and 20% externally. We use industrial loaders, presses, shears, pre-grinders and, of course, our new Panizzolo Mega 1100 series hammermill. Processing starts with a selection of parts, after which the smaller vehicles are pressed while the others are pre-ground and fed into the new hammermill.
Our aim is to recycle and recover as much material as possible. We sell on the metal output from our treatment plants to other companies or directly to steel mills, depending on the grades we have.’
Giacomo: Pollini Lorenzo & Sons is authorised to dismantle petrol, diesel, LPG, natural gas and electric vehicles. We purchase incoming vehicles from dealerships and workshops, from depot tenders and companies such as FCA – from which we take back production rejects and prototypes – and from private customers.
The inflow is around 20-25 000 vehicles per year. We have also recently expanded our pick-up service for all types of buses and lorries. The process involves reclamation, dismantling – an almost entirely manual process – and the evaluation of individual parts.


Reject parts are sent to the grinding plants while those in good condition follow a meticulous process of quality control, registration and cataloguing, and are then stored in our warehouses. These boast around 350 000 items catalogued and ready for resale and are divided into manual picking areas and high-density vertical automated warehouses designed for quick access, space-saving and goods preservation.
Through our shops and e-commerce, we sell spare parts to workshops, body shops and private customers throughout Italy. E-commerce, which had been planned for several years, was quickly introduced at the beginning of 2021 to cope with the restrictions caused by Covid-19.
The online market is growing steadily, now covering about 10% of parts sales, although the public and companies still prefer our physical shops (covering about 50%) and telephone sales (covering the remaining 40%).
What additional equipment do you use?
Matteo: In our in-house workshop, we make prototypes of technologies that can facilitate certain tasks. At Pollini srl, we have designed and built a vice to position the material so we can rotate and move the vehicle at will. It means we can more easily remove certain materials such as the windscreen, bumpers and engine.
Giacomo: At Pollini Lorenzo & Sons, we have also used our workshop to create a new accessory tool: a rotating platform that allows the operator to dismantle one vehicle after another, minimising downtime due to moving and re-positioning cars, while increasing the safety of our workers within the production area.
Your last treatment step consists of grinding. What made Panizzolo’s tech stand out?
Matteo: ‘Almost all of the scrap processed by Pollini srl comes from what cannot be recovered at our other branch. Among this, the material par excellence, is the bodywork of end-of-life vehicles, on which we perform the final treatment stages. Until a few years ago, after a volumetric reduction of the vehicle, we operated this process with a single-shaft shredder which could not meet our recovery quality requirements.
The company has always been at the forefront of technological investments to keep us competitive so we decided to discard the old machinery, preferring a hammermill for the quality of ferrous and metallic products we are looking for. We’d already known Panizzolo, having been suppliers of scrap metal for its treatment plant for several years.
After constructive discussions with Fabrizio Scussolin, its recycling systems’ sales manager for Italy, we turned to the Mega 1100 hammermill model for several reasons: the excellent price/performance ratio, hourly productivity, energy consumption and, above all, the ease and simplicity of maintenance.
We also really liked the possibility of a flexible machine, with its patented interchangeable cradle, allowing us to expand the range of scrap to be processed. The Panizzolo Mega 1100 hammermill was supplemented with separation systems that we already had in-house in our previous system. We are finalising the settings but we are already getting good results.’
What are your goals and what do you expect of the market?
Matteo: ‘Pollini’s main objective is to refine its treatment cycles, with a view to optimising metal recovery and reclamation. In recent years, this vision has led to several certifications such as UNI EN ISO 9001, UNI EN ISO 14001 and UNI EN ISO 45001.
We are always looking to implement and refine our capabilities and technologies to be in step with changes in the market and its quality requirements. The new Panizzolo Mega 1100 hammermill is the plus that will also allow us to achieve these goals and to close the circular economy within the Pollini Group.’
Giacomo: ‘The scrap sector has always been very volatile and that’s unlikely to change in the near future. What will change, however, are the processing methods and new technologies in our industry and the impact of electric vehicles. Even though we only handle about ten EVs a month, mostly prototypes, we need to organise ourselves quickly to handle this new type of scrap.
Electric vehicle recovery will be the challenge of the next decade and Pollini Lorenzo & Sons is already moving in this direction with the same professionalism and seriousness that has distinguished it for more than 40 years.’
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