Abstract: A method and apparatus serve to packaging material and its contents, specifically from packaging elements filled with soft material such as food packaging. The method allows a clean separation of the packaging and content materials so that, according to the application, each of these materials can be reused individually with substantially no further preparation. The apparatus comprises a combination of a coarse cutter in the form of a shredder and a soft separator working on the drum and pressing belt principle with a further fine cutter or fragmenter in the form of a blower mill arranged downstream of these. By coarsely cutting the packaging materials prior to compression, cavities in which amounts of contents material may remain trapped cannot be formed, the soft separator can thus operate more effectively to cleanly separate the two materials.