Let’s Talk Shredders

We understand that, to the average person, shredding isn’t fun. It means hours and hours are wasted manually feeding documents into a home or office shredder, and then worrying about what to do with the bag of shredded paper.

While it may not be fun, shredding is important. Understanding the difference between Strip Cut shredding, Cross Cut shredding, DIY shredding, and using a shredding service supplier is essential to keep your data safe.

So, what is the difference between Strip Cut shredding and Cross Cut shredding?

 Most standard office and home shredders cut documents into long, straight pieces. This is known as Strip Cut shredding.

Cross Cut shredding, on the other hand, is where documents are cut into tiny fragments.

There are several issues with using Strip Cut shredders. The biggest issue is that the pieces are so easy to put back together. We demonstrate just how easy it is in the video below.

There are other issues too. Office and home shredders tend to shred around 50 pages before filling a bag. But what happens to that bag of shredded paper? Does it just get placed in an external recycling or general waste bin, ready for the taking by data thieves? In most cases, it probably does. In some cities, businesses even leave their general waste and recycling outside their doors on the street ready for collection – completely exposed! Those bags containing confidential information can be taken by anyone. Once taken, the documents can, as demonstrated, be put back together in no time at all.

Cross Cut shredding is a much more secure option, and at Shred Station, we use the Cross Cut shredding method as standard. Cross Cut paper is extremely difficult to put back together, due to how small the shredded pieces are.

Some Cross Cut shredders can be bought for the home or office, but these are usually quite expensive, and the issue of where shredded pieces are kept is still present.

So, how is what we do any different?

DIY Shredding vs Shredding with Shred Station

When you do your shredding at home or the office, as we’ve explained, you run the risk of your shredded paper being taken by data thieves.

With our shredding services, your confidential documents can be kept in a locked bin or container at your home or office until collection. Your documents will then be shredded either onsite at your premises, or offsite at one of our secure depots. The paper will then be commingled, baled, pulped, and recycled. At no point in our process will any documents be accessible to the public.

Our Onsite Service

With our onsite service,  your documents will be loaded into our secure shredding trucks and destroyed by our onboard shredders. Once shredded, the fragments are commingled with the five or six tonnes of other shredded paper that our onsite vehicles shred each day. That’s around 980 million paper fragments in total!

Our Offsite Service

If we take your documents for offsite shredding, we take these away in locked containers, onboard our secure, locked, CCTV monitored and GPS tracked trucks. When shredded offsite, your documents are mixed in with around forty to fifty tonnes of other paper! This paper is loaded into our industrial shredders and the tiny fragments get commingled with billions of pieces of other shredded paper.

What is Commingling?

All paper collected by us is commingled. Commingling is where big, corkscrew-like mechanisms, conveyors, and other specialist shredding equipment mixes all of the shredded materials together. It is an additional security measure that we take to ensure the fragments of your documents are separated from each other and spread around in several tonnes of other paperwork. By commingling, we ensure that your documents can never be pieced back together again. To even find two tiny pieces of paper from the same original document would be next to impossible. In fact, you’d be statistically more likely to win the lottery.

If you shred your documents at home or using a shredder at the office, it’s highly unlikely that the pieces of your document will end up mixed in with millions of others. At most, the shredded pieces might be put into three or four bags with other documents. Not an impossible challenge for an experienced data thief.

Our Baling and Recycling Process

Every fragment of paper we shred gets baled into blocks of 750kg. In a single bale, there may only be a one or two fragments from the same original document, and a single piece of A4 paper is typically spread across 5 or 6 bales.

These bales are sent directly to UK paper mills and are never left in public, seen by the public, or accessed by the public.

They then get turned into pulp and are used to manufacture recycled paper products. This could be anything from tissue paper to animal bedding.

When you use Shred Station as your shredding service provider, your data is truly irretrievable. Our standard shredding services are extremely secure. There is also no risk of a data thief putting your documents back together once it’s in our hands.

For ultimate security, we also offer an even higher security shredding service. With our high-security shredding service, your confidential waste can be shredded into minuscule 6mm sized fragments. It can even be shredded down to dust if you choose an off-site shredding service!

If you’d like to know more about our shredding services, please get in touch today. We have services to suit businesses of all sizes, as well as domestic individuals, and with Shred Station, your data is truly safe.

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