Vecoplan AG has every reason to celebrate. The success story of today’s market leader began in June 1969 – exactly 50 years ago. It took courage to start up a recycling company in the Westerwald, especially at a time when the topic was new and not as generally well-known as it is today. Irene Scheidweiler was only 22 years old when she founded the company in Bad Marienberg with two partners. With entrepreneurial foresight, she saw the potential in the new industry and developed pioneering shredders, first with the chipper and then with the Vecoplan waste shredder (VAZ). Over the years, Vecoplan pushed ahead with more innovations and the company has meanwhile registered many patents for new drive concepts and abrasion & shredding technologies. Today, customers in the wood sector receive solutions that enable them to reprocess sawmill waste, logs, round wood, slabs, bamboo, pile caps, chipboard, pallets, bark, waste wood from the wood-processing industry and general wood leftovers. The processing technology of the Westerwald-based company also plays a vital role in the increasingly-important production of energy from biomass.
Vecoplan is also highly successful in the Recycling I Waste sector, where the company’s customers receive well thought-out and user-oriented shredding & processing solutions, overall concepts for the material and thermal processing of household and industrial waste, plastic & paper, and specific ideas for the production of alternative fuels & solutions for the destruction of files and data.
To ensure optimal support for plant operators, the Westerwald company attaches great importance to comprehensive Service | Parts – the ‘third business division’. The service spectrum includes 24/7 telephone availability, training, maintenance, spare parts service and support for the modernisation and expansion of machines and components. Vecoplan also offers a unique Live Service, an Industry 4.0 maintenance tool that gives users immediate online support.
Space for development
To enable the continual development of efficient solutions for special orders, Vecoplan opened its new Technology Centre on an area of 1,200 square metres in 2014. Based on tests with individual feed materials, the specialist company can configure customer-specific machines in the Centre – so Vecoplan currently has the largest, most advanced development centre for environmental technology in the world.
However, the company’s 400+ employees are not all based at the head office in Bad Marienberg – over the years, the market leader has established branches and sales offices in the USA, Great Britain, Spain and Austria – and a new subsidiary in Poland was added to the Vecoplan family this year. The reference customer list naturally includes Europe, but it also contains core markets such as Canada and the USA. Among other locations, Vecoplan plants are in use in Turkey and emerging markets on the South American continent. Today, the export quota is over 80 percent.
In 1995, Vecoplan became a subsidiary of today’s M.A.X. Automation SE in Düsseldorf. And the company’s founder? Irene Scheidweiler remained managing director and a member of the executive board until 2012, after which she moved to the supervisory board, accompanying Vecoplan AG in this function until 2018. Today, the company is managed by management board members Werner Berens and Michael Lambert. Berens joined the company in 2012 and is responsible for the individual divisions and supply chain activities. Michael Lambert has been the second member of the Management Board since 2019; he heads the commercial department and is the managing director of the European subsidiaries. What has made Vecoplan so successful? “We are product leaders, ‘Made in Germany,’ says Werner Berens. “We can only support our customers with forward-looking solutions that offer significant added value – and our partners know that we always keep our promises.”
Anniversary celebration - 50 years of Vecoplan
Vecoplan is 50! Employees and their families came together to celebrate with company founder Irene Scheidweiler on 15 June 2019.
