Abstract: A rotary lawn mower includes apparatus for chopping and shredding materials such as cuttings, etc. into a mulch and collecting the mulch in a storage facility attached to the mower's housing. The device includes three blades affixed to the same vertically oriented drive shaft, vertically spaced from one another and rotationally staggered. An uppermost blade chops articles as they are fed into the mower's housing from a hopper thereabove, and the blade below shreds the chopped articles by engaging them against pairs of opposed shredder bars between which the shredder blade passes. Following this, the shredded material is passed out of a side opening in the housing into the collecting container by the centrifugal action of the chopping and shredding blades and by a fan effect of a mower blade, which is lowermost on the drive shaft. A bottom plate may be secured over the opening at the bottom of the apparatus when it is to be used for chopping and shredding.