Bendigo-based demolition and recycling specialist Hopley Group has commissioned its second TANA shredder, scaling timber and construction waste recovery across regional Victoria, a decade after putting its first machine into service. That is according to Justin Hopley, Group Director of Hopley Group, who said the new TANA Shark was delivered in early 2026 to replace the company’s original 2014-model unit.
Wood Central understands that the original purchase made Hopley Group an early Australian adopter of the TANA shredder, with the decision taken after Justin Hopley and the broader Hopley team witnessed a unit working through heavy steel and massive timber in Perth.
As it stands, Australia sends more than 60 per cent of its timber to landfill, with the balance burnt as fuel, as Wood Central reported on the launch of the Australian Timber Circularity Project’s first national resource map earlier this year.
Hopley Group’s investment also runs alongside a broader expansion in Australian shredding and recycling infrastructure, with German specialist Vecoplan AG appointing AE Gibson & Sons as its national distributor in October 2025 to grow Australian distribution across wood, biomass and waste sectors. Hopley Group’s second TANA Shark adds capacity at the operator level and runs directly through the company’s existing concrete, brick and asphalt recovery streams across central Victoria.
The new Shark has been built around a fully computerised touch-screen interface, with operators adjusting conveyor speeds, engine power and magnet heights through finger-tip controls and the machine itself able to be moved around site by remote control, ‘like a robot’. Hopley said one of the most significant upgrades had been the shift to tungsten material on the barrel, which reduces the need for manual hard-facing and maintenance.
Hopley Group runs the Shark as the primary processor across a waste stream that spans timber flooring, weatherboards, mattresses, tyres and tree stumps, with the machine often achieving throughputs of three to four cubic metres a minute. Steel screen mats are dropped in when the team needs woodchip-grade output for composting, with the material sized down to 25 millimetres.
“It’ll just about shred anything,” Hopley said.
Output from the Shark feeds several Hopley Group product lines, with timber and green waste blended with soils and composted for 12 months before being screened and sold. Concrete and brick run through the broader operation at more than 75,000 tonnes a year and are turned into road-base materials, drainage aggregates and decorative products, with crushed asphalt sold back for use in new road designs.
Hopley Group’s recovery work joins a growing Australian push to bring demolition timber back into the supply chain, with regional operators converting mixed feedstock into woodchip, compost and aggregate at scale. Murdoch University’s Boola Katatjin project, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest mass timber building at completion, recovered or upcycled almost all of its construction and demolition waste through similar regional sorting and processing, as Wood Central reported.
Monash University researchers are also pushing the technology side, with deep-learning models capable of identifying contaminated wood from high-resolution images at 91.67 per cent accuracy. The research is designed to support the on-site sorting operators like Hopley Group rely on to keep recovered timber out of landfill.
Recovered demolition timber is also being remanufactured into new structural products offshore, with University College London’s Circular Economy Lab and UK CLT demonstrating a CascadeUp modular CLT prototype made entirely from recycled demolition timber that would otherwise be downcycled or burnt for energy, as Wood Central reported.
Tana Australia, the exclusive distributor of TANA equipment in Australia and surrounding regions, has integrated remote diagnostics through its TanaConnect platform, allowing technicians to access the Shark’s GPS and computer codes from anywhere when the operator encounters a fault. Parts orders typically reach the Bendigo site within two days, Hopley said, with machines running up to six days a week and Hopley Group planning to increase running hours as new picking stations are integrated into the operation. “You can ring out-of-hours on a Saturday afternoon, and the tech guys will answer,” he said.
