Guidetti Turned an EIC Accelerator Grant Into Blade-Free Recycling

Metal recyclers grind scrap with blades, and blades wear out. Guidetti, a machine builder from Renazzo near Ferrara that has built cable granulators since the 1980s, told the European Commission that conventional plants stop every 8 hours to sharpen their blades. Its answer was MRP, a tower of hammer mills and centrifugal drums in which scrap is smashed apart by collision rather than cut. In the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, the Commission selected the project for a grant, according to its list of winners. Guidetti SRL is the only beneficiary named for MRP.

The EU contribution was €1,906,733.15, 70% of a €2,723,904.50 project that ran from 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2021, according to CORDIS. Two pilot plants were built. Seven years on, the MRP line is in Guidetti's catalogue, the company is profitable and busy at trade fairs, and the only MRP sale on the public record is one the project coordinator mentioned in November 2021.

Where Guidetti Stands Now

Guidetti is active. The Italian business register data shown by RegistroAziende.it lists the company as "Attiva", with 25 to 49 employees, at the same Renazzo address that CORDIS gives for the project. In 2026 the company announced appearances at the ReMA convention in Las Vegas through its US partner ERS, at Wire in Düsseldorf and at Ecomed in Catania, according to its news page, and it listed a stand at IFAT 2026 in Munich. Its events page also lists E-Waste World in Frankfurt in June 2026 and RE Tech Korea in September 2026. In 2025 Valentina Guidetti became managing director and Francesco Guidetti head of service and R&D, alongside their father Mauro Guidetti as president, according to a March 2026 profile in Recycling International. US customs data independently show shipments from Guidetti in Renazzo to ERS LLC in Atlanta, the latest visible one dated 11 September 2025, according to Panjiva; ImportGenius counts 156 US shipments between November 2006 and September 2026.

None of the 2026 trade fair announcements names MRP. The products Guidetti put forward were cable recycling lines and the Sincro 315 Eko granulator. Its most recent award, at the Ekotech fair in Poland in April 2025, was for its Reco Mill series, according to the company's announcement.

The Technology: Hammers Instead of Blades

Conventional plants for cables, electronic scrap and car shredder residue grind material with rotating blades or shears and then separate metal from plastic. MRP replaces the blades with high-durability hammers and centrifugal drums stacked in a tower, so that the waste breaks apart as particles hit each other, the project objective says. Gravity carries the material down through the modules, an automatic system pulls out aluminium and copper along the way, and a final turbo mill separates the remaining metal from plastic, glass, wood and paper, project coordinator Francesca Guidetti told CORDIS. The process is dry and uses no chemicals.

The claims rest on Guidetti's own figures. The application promised a 99% recycling rate against "barely" 70% for blade plants, "up to 10 times less maintenance costs", two operators instead of 6 to 10, and a footprint of 10 by 10 by 16 metres. The Phase 1 summary of 2017 had promised a "100% recovery rate" and 30% less power, according to CORDIS. In September 2020 the trade site Recycling Inside reported versions for 1,500 and 3,000 kg per hour, metal purity of 99.9% and 40% lower operating costs. The current product page says "up to 99% purity". No independent measurement of any of these numbers has been published.

The sources also disagree on the baseline. The project objective says conventional blades must be replaced every 24 working hours; the CORDIS results article says every 70 to 80 hours on average. The periodic report says MRP's tools run for 500 hours without replacement.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

MRP was Guidetti's second EU grant for the same machine. In Phase 1, from November 2017 to March 2018, the EU paid €50,000 towards a €71,429 feasibility study, and Guidetti said it would launch the product "ideally by 2020" and forecast €12.4 million of revenue and €5.58 million of profit over 5 years. The Phase 2 application moved the start of sales to 2021 and forecast €15 million of revenue and €5 million of profit over 4 years, a return on investment of 3.65.

The final periodic report, covering July 2020 to June 2021, says the programme "was fully carried out". Two pilot plants were built, one at the Renazzo headquarters and one at an "authorized customer" who ran it continuously and supplied operating data. Covid-19 cancelled the planned inaugurations and trade fairs, so Guidetti ran remote tests on customer samples. The report counts four customer visits to the second pilot, 16 requests for offers and an expected order for "at least 1 MRP lines in Switzerland". In the CORDIS results article, published in November 2021, Francesca Guidetti said: "We have already made one sale and are hopeful of more before the end of the year." The customer for that sale is not named, and no Swiss order has been announced.

1. Build and test MRP at industrial scaleDeliveredTwo pilot plants, per the final report and Recycling Inside.
2. Put MRP on the market from 2021DeliveredMRP line on the product page; one sale reported in 2021.
3. Order for an MRP line in SwitzerlandNot announcedNo customer named by Guidetti or any third party.
4. €15M MRP revenue in 4 yearsNot shownNo MRP sales figures or installations published since 2021.
5. 99% recovery, 10 times less maintenanceUnverifiedCompany figures only; no independent test.
6. Finish on timeDeliveredEnded 30 June 2021 as planned; final report published.

The Money

Guidetti was profitable before the grant arrived. It made a net profit of €1,591,154 in 2019, the year the project started, on revenue of €13,523,100, and stayed profitable through the pandemic dip of 2020, according to accounts published by Top Aziende. Revenue reached €17,038,809 in 2023 with a profit of €4,995,757, then fell to €15,383,768 in 2024 with a profit of €1,397,951; RegistroAziende.it shows the same figures for 2022 to 2024. Over the six years from 2019 to 2024, Guidetti earned €14.68 million in profit, about 7.7 times the EU grant. Accounts for 2025 show revenue of about €14.5 million and 45 staff, according to ReportAziende and Atoka; ReportAziende puts the 2025 profit at €1.8 million, up 29.1%.

The accounts do not split revenue by product, so how much MRP contributes cannot be seen. Over 2021 to 2024, the four years in which the application expected €15 million from MRP, the whole company took in €58.3 million. No outside investor and no EIC Fund stake has been found; the award was grant only.

How Guidetti Tells the Story

Guidetti's own history of the company, on its website, dates to 2020 the entry "The EU awards the MRP project with the Seal of Excellence under the Horizon 2020 program", and to 2021 the installation of the first MRP tower prototype in Renazzo, although Recycling Inside reported in September 2020 that the tower could already be visited there. A Seal of Excellence is the label the EU gives to proposals it rates highly but does not fund. CORDIS shows that MRP was funded, twice: €50,000 in 2017 and €1,906,733.15 in 2019. The company's account of its own founding also varies: its timeline starts in 1980, its 2017 Phase 1 summary says "since 1980", and a 2014 trade fair profile by Targi Kielce says it was founded in the 1980s and had then supplied more than 2,000 units to over 1,000 clients, and the March 2026 anniversary profile in Recycling International says it was founded in 1996.

Why Europe Should Care

Copper and aluminium are both on the EU's list of strategic raw materials in the Critical Raw Materials Act, which sets a benchmark for EU recycling capacity to supply at least 25% of annual consumption of strategic raw materials. Cables, electric motors, radiators and electronic scrap are among the richest domestic sources of both metals, and Guidetti's Phase 1 summary tied MRP to the WEEE Directive and to the export of electronic waste to countries with poor recycling facilities. Dry mechanical separation that recovers more metal with less energy fits that agenda. Whether MRP does so better than established plants has not been shown by anyone other than Guidetti.

The Verdict

Guidetti and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.