Business Savvy » How’s the Shredding Business These Days?

How’s the Shredding Business These Days? | Business Savvy

Oct 20 2007

How’s the Shredding Business These Days?

Published by Jennifer at 11:00 am under Shredding

The short answer is: shredding is doing great! Today there are dozens of methods and hundreds of devices to make information disposal easy and convenient. Which is good news, because the need for shredding is greater than ever. Medical document handling, hard-to-erase hard drives, identity theft, changing legal requirements and many other issues make shredding very much in your interest.

With the growth of computer technology, copiers and the Internet over the past few decades more information is stored than ever before. It was once predicted that their lower cost and increased use would lead to a ‘paperless society’. Oh, would that it were so! The growth of those technologies has only increased the use of paper along with the other methods for storing data.

That data has to be protected from unauthorized use, even after it’s no longer needed by the authorized user. Shredding is one of the most important ways of doing that. One key adjunct of home shredding devices is document destruction and disposal companies.

Not only is it necessary to shred documents, hard drives, CDs and other storage media. You have to do something with the stuff after it’s destroyed. Destroyed doesn’t mean disintegrated. That’s the function of commercial shredders, shredding bins, trucks and disposal facilities. They take the material to the next stage.

They go beyond simple ‘trash collection’, because one of the most common methods of identity theft is to sift through your trash and piece back together shredded documents. They can securely remove the shredded material and ensure that no one ever sees it again. Once burned or mixed with tons of other material, there’s no way for potential thieves to get at your information.

They also offer bulk shredding services. If you have a large amount of material, or material that’s hard to rend such as CDs or hard drives, they can solve the problem. Laws and simple common sense both require protection of your medical records. These companies have specialized equipment and the knowledge of how to protect your personal and business information.

Whether onsite or as a location to which you can take sensitive information, they provide a service it would be difficult to perform for yourself past a certain point. It would be difficult and cost-prohibitive for an individual to have a bulk shredder, a baler and other large scale equipment to do the job properly.

Congress can pass laws to punish violators, but they can’t prevent the violations in advance. Only you and those you pay for services can do that. So, if the shredding business is doing well, it’s because they provide products and services that help you keep your information private. Ultimately, that keeps your money where it belongs: in your pocket, not the criminal’s.