Many people wonder why they should use a professional shredding service when they can have their documents shredded at home or office. Well, shredding might seem like an easy thing to do yourself, however, when getting into the details a professional shredding service may be the best choice. Here are 6 reasons why it is better to use a professional shredding service.
1. Ease
Small office shredders can typically take up to 20 sheets per cycle. When compared to typical industrial shredders which can take about 1,000 sheets or more per cycle, office shredders fall short. If a large amount is fed into an office shredder, it can overheat, jam, breakdown, or even worse permanently stop working. If you’re a small business it is often not worth the time of constantly unjamming or the cost of buying a new shredder. Additionally, depending on your office’s stack of papers to be shredded and how often paper gets added to it, it may take hours to clear the stack. The bigger the stack and the smaller capacity of an in house shredder per cycle mean the higher the cost of shredding.
With a professional shredding service, all you have to do is prepare your documents, call your preferred shredding provider, and set up the best course of action for your shredding needs.
2. Convenience
If you have ever let things pile up because of a busy schedule or the number of things you may need to do in a day, then you already have any idea of how inconvenient it can be added shredding your documents at your home or office to the list. This will only take more time and money than is necessary. By comparison, filling a container with your paper and calling us, or another shredding company, to deal with the rest.
3. It Is Time-Effective
I think we all know that using an office shredder can be very time-consuming. Feeding the shredder a couple of sheets at a time can be mundane and feel like a bad use of time, especially during work hours. Not only does feeding the machine take up time, but also preparing the paper; taking out the staples, paper clips, and the binding for the bulk of documents is both required and time-intensive. This whole process can be sped up with the use of a professional shredding service. A commercial shredder can shred 1-64 gallon bins of paper (5-7 boxes of paper ) in 5-7 minutes! No removal of paperclips, staples or binding is needed. The cherry on top of all of this is that it only takes a 5-minute call and a 5-minute pickup time, only having to spend 10 minutes of your time to shred all of your documents.
4. Fraud
According to the FTC, in 2017, there have been 140 complaints per 100,000 general population and 55,418 complaint reports of identity theft in California. There have also been 570 complaints per 100,000 general population and 225,295 complaint reports in California for fraud. To ensure that you have less risk of fraud, a professional shredding service can help destroy your documents containing important data. By shredding your paper documents, you are reducing the risk of the possible fraud that could occur. When documents are shredded with a professional shredding service the paper is cross-cut, turning it into confetti-like material and making it impossible to piece together. This ensures that people can not extract your data from your documents.
5. Security
Many people believe that professional shredding services are not secure. Why would you have a bunch of strangers, that you never met, handle your most secure documents? That would not be smart, right? But in actuality, professional shredding services are one of the safest ways to destroy and dispose of your documents. Most professional shredding services are NAID (National Association for Information Destruction) AAA Certified - covering:
• FACTA (Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act) Final Disposal Rule
• FACTA Red Flags Rule
• HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
• PCI (Payment Card Industry ) Compliance
Most shredding companies give you the option of on-site shredding, meaning that you can watch your documents be destroyed and have the peace of mind - knowing your documents are securely destroyed. On top of all this, all professional shredding service will send you a certificate of destruction upon the completion of shredding the documents.
6. Laws and Regulations
More than half of the states in America have created and enforced laws that require private and/or government institutions to destroy and dispose of personal information collected from customers and consumers. The FTC’s Disposal Rule and HIPPA being two of the many that exist. The FTC’s Disposal rule requires proper disposal of information in consumer reports and records to protect against unauthorized access to or use of the information.
For many businesses, shredding is essential for them to keep running, especially if the business owners do not want to deal with legal ramifications. Specifically, in California - government institutions do not have any data disposal laws that apply to them. However, California businesses have data disposal laws that apply to them. This means that all businesses that have in possession records containing customer’s personal information or records containing sensitive data have to be shredded, erased, or modified beyond recognition to make them “unreadable” or “undecipherable”. If the businesses do not comply with this, they are heavily fined and this can take a big toll on small or local businesses.