Why it could be time to retire your home or office shredder

Small home or office shredding machines may have been essential in the past. But, as technologies move on and people are more invested in their data and how it’s handled, home and office shredders have become a bit of an inconvenience for those who use them.

If you or your business are still using an office shredder, it could be time to retire it.

The inconveniences of using a home or office shredder

There are many inconveniences associated with having a home or office shredder. They take up a lot of space. They pose a health and safety risk. The need to remove staples and paperclips before shredding wastes time and creates work. Even relatively high-end home and office shredders can take a long time to shred low volumes of paper. Often, they can only run for a few hours before needing to cool down, and they require ongoing maintenance. They also need emptying regularly, and then can become even more of an inconvenience!

Some UK councils don’t accept shredded paper in their recycling bins, and leaving long strips of paper outside in an unlocked bin can pose a data security risk in itself. For businesses especially, shredding in-house means you have no evidence of destruction. When you shred using an industrial shredding company, you’ll receive not only a Waste Transfer Note but also a Certificate of Destruction for your audit trail.

Shredding technology has evolved

The slow, noisy office shredders that started appearing in most workplaces in the 1950s-80s have stayed mostly the same decades on. Industrial shredders, however, have come along in leaps and bounds.

Shredding capacity

Our on-site shredding vehicles are fitted with industrial shredding technology. They can destroy an enormous 600,000 sheets or 160 boxes of paper per hour. If your business wanted to shred 20 boxes of paper, this would take us just a few minutes. Or, it could potentially take one of your employees days when you consider the standard cooling times of an office shredder.

Our depot shredders used for off-site shredding can destroy even more! Each of our depots is home to a massive industrial shredding machine capable of destroying 100+ tonnes of paper every day.

Shred size

Capacity isn’t the only thing that’s improved with shredding technology. Industrial shredders and granulators use the multi-cut method of shredding. This is much more secure than the traditional “strip-cut” method due to the smaller shred size it produces. The multi-cut technology used in our industrial shredders also produces a more random cut than you would receive from strip or even cross-cut office shredders, ensuring all shredded material would be practically impossible to piece together. With an industrial shredder, the destruction of your materials doesn’t happen in isolation. We commingle the materials with hundreds of other confidential documents.

The post-shredding process

When you finish shredding your paperwork with an office shredder, you then have to decide what to do with the bags of shredding. Should you put it in the recycling? Should you separate it into smaller bags and dispose of it gradually? Neither of these options are ideal.

At Shred Station, our industrial depot shredders feed onto a large conveyor. This conveyor links our shredding and baling machines.

The baling machines turn shredded paper into big 750kg bales. The bales are kept under lock and key and are monitored by 360 24hr CCTV. From there, we transport the bales directly to UK paper mills. There they use the bales to make new paper products such as toilet and kitchen rolls, sanitary products, and much more.

Shredding on an industrial scale keeps your data even safer

When your paperwork is mixed in with tonnes of other paperwork at a Shred Station depot, either to be shredded at the depot or shredded on board one of our mobile shredders and mixed in with all the other shredded material in the rear of the vehicle, you eliminate the risk of that paperwork being reassembled. Not only because of the sheer volume of other paper fragments in the building and the speed of the process, but also the security controls.

Paper fragments at our depots are all mixed together in a process called commingling. This is also the case with our on-site shredding vehicles. Onboard these vehicles, the paper goes through our industrial mobile shredders and the fragments get mixed with around five or six tonnes of other shredded paper throughout the day. This extra step of mixing materials helps make sure that paper fragments from the same original document are separated. Other security measures we take include depot access controls. All of our sites are fully secure with coded entry systems, perimeter fencing, CCTV and state-of-the-art alarm systems. Materials will never be accessible by members of the public, and only ever shredded by BS7858 security-vetted professionals. Our vehicles also have many security features including comprehensive CCTV, GPS and telematics tracking. Much safer than leaving your long strips of shredded paper outside in an unlocked bin!

Time to outsource your shredding?

If you are thinking of taking your data shredding a little more seriously, the best option is to outsource the job to trained, security-vetted and accredited professionals. Not only will this save you a huge amount of time, but it could also minimise the risk of a data breach, and will even help the environment at the same time! Shredding is a very environmentally friendly way of destroying your confidential documents. All of Shred Station’s services are CarbonNeutral® certified, and we recycle 100% of shredded paper here in the UK. By recycling over 4,500 tonnes of paper each month, we save around 77,000 trees from deforestation.

Get in touch to see how we could help you.

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