There comes a time in the life of every office — whether it’s a small home office or a large commercial one – when documents need to be sorted and disposed of. When those documents contain private or sensitive information, they can’t simply be tossed in the trash. Doing so could expose your data or that of clients to potential theft or misuse.
This is why sensitive documents should be shredded. Once you’ve organized your paperwork and identified the documents that need to be destroyed, you have two choices: do the shredding yourself (or task an employee with doing it) or hire a professional shredding service to do it for you. Here are the differences between the two shredding strategies.
DIY Shredding
Risk of data theft — If you’re a business owner, it’s likely that you don’t have time to feed a mountain of documents into a shredder. This means that the chore will likely fall to an employee or an intern. Assigning the shredding of sensitive documents to someone in your office increases the likelihood of important documents being lost or stolen – putting sensitive data at risk.
Time-consuming — No matter who gets tasked with the job of shredding the documents, it will be time-consuming. First, all of the binder clips, staples, rubber bands, and paper clips need to be removed from the documents. Next, they’ll have to be fed into the machine in stacks small enough that they won’t jam the shredder.
No recycling — DIY shredded paper can’t be tossed in with curbside recycling because there’s no way to separate it, so it’ll have to go into the dumpster with all of your regular trash. This stinks – and not just because of all of the garbage. For one, your shredded paper will take up extra room in a landfill. In addition to this, people can sift through the garbage and attempt to piece together bits of shredded paper in hopes of gleaning valuable or useful information off of it.
Professional Shredding Services
On-site pickup — After you set aside the documents that need to be destroyed, that’s where your work ends. A professional document disposal company like Paper Tiger will pick up your documents and transport them to be shredded. (We can even send out a truck equipped for mobile shredding if you’d like your paperwork to be disposed of on-site.)
Secure shredding room run by dedicated professionals — When you send your documents to be shredded by a professional company, your paperwork is whisked away into a secure shredding room where only authorized team members are allowed. There, they’re loaded onto a conveyer belt before being fed into the shredder.
Saves time — Using a company like Paper Tiger to shred your sensitive documents means that you don’t waste time yanking out staples or trying to unjam a shredder machine with a pair of scissors. Professional equipment can handle binder clips, staples, etc. When you outsource your shredding services, it frees you to do what you do best – running your business and/or taking care of responsibilities at home.
Safer and eco-friendly — When paper is shredded by professionals, it’s compiled into giant bales and sent off to the paper mill for recycling. This means that you’re saving huge space in local landfills as well as providing fodder for brand-new cardboard, office paper, toilet paper, and other paper products. It also means that there are no confetti strands of shredded paper waiting in a dumpster for an enterprising thief to steal.
When you look at DIY shredding versus hiring a professional shredding service, there’s no comparison. Whether it’s time saved, the peace of mind of knowing that your data has been securely destroyed, or knowing that you’ve avoided sending more material into a landfill, is there any reason not to use professional shredding services?
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