unusual piece of machinery

The local recycling facilities here have them attached to excavators to compress the contents of the skips.

Yes

"Designed to break down and compact loose light recyclable waste material in skips and large bins to increase the payloads, the ROLL PACKER RP 7700 rolling skip compactor is a static electric drive unit with a 6.6m long rolling compaction capacity."

"The roll packer Gigant GT 1750 is exceptionally suited for compacting large amounts of bulky waste into standard open top containers. Bulky waste as searchable palette, wooden boxes, old furniture, drums and other light metal parts will be broken and compacted by the moving roller. "

Chris

A skip compactor was my guess.

You'd think it'd need more than a 1.5Kg roller though, wouldn't you??

I suspect 1.5Kg was a typo, you'd have a job to pick that roller up by hand but I expect a fair bit of the downforce comes from the hydraulic rams on the arm. The mincing action of the rotating rollers must make quite a contribution to the compaction too.

I suspect it started life as 1,500Kg and some office junior thought they were correcting it ...

I've just read the spec further down the page:

Roller width: 1,700mm Roller diameter: 1,150mm Roller weight: 1,200Kg

Each individual spike looks like it might be 1.5Kg or more.

Part of a very big Mouli grater!

Angle grinder?