The Proper Way To Process Document Shredding: The Shred-It-All Rule

A great many businesses around the country have complex schedules that determine how long any given piece of paperwork needs to be retained before it gets thrown away, and a second set of rules governing which paper should be destroyed rather than merely tossed. We'd like to suggest an alternative: instead of making two decisions -- one about when to act and a second about what act to take -- simplify. Stick to the 'how long until we can ditch this' policy, and when you do decide that a given paper has reached the end of its lifespan, pass it off to your document shredding experts regardless of what it is.

Why? There are lots of really good reasons:

Better Safe than Sorry The moment you add an extra decision to the 'waste document flowchart', you add an assortment of extra risks to the process. Namely: -An employee might make a judgment call about how safe a paper is to toss, and be wrong. -An employee might simply be too lazy to walk from the circular file over to the locked shredding container. -An employee might make a simple mistake and put the 'to shred' stack of papers into the trash by mistake (and vice versa, naturally.) -An employee might simply decide to invite disaster on their employer by deliberately exposing you to risk.

Studies have shown that about 40% of data breaches do happen because of this - simple human error. So a shred-everything policy will definitely go a long way to the elimination of that big security hole.

It's A Lot Harder For a Criminal Employee to Take Advantage

When your default option is to shred everything, and any piece of paper in the trash rather than the container is grounds for some questions and answers, your risk of being caught in a liability situation is hugely reduced. We're not advocating shredding every flyer that someone finds on their car window (though why you wouldn't is kind of a good question, too) -- but any and every piece of business paperwork ought to be shredded the moment it's definitely not useful anymore.

Shredding Everything is Good Green Business

Imagine this, a line of flatbed trucks, all of them stacked with paper, and then lined up bumper-to-bumper from Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh - that is exactly the amount of paperwork that all of the businesses in the area of Philadelphia are producing weekly. The vast majority of those papers unfortunately end up in the landfills. And while they do degrade faster compared to soda bottles, there's still a much better ending for all of that paper waste: the recycler's. All the paper shredded ends up there, therefore a shred-everything policy is a really great way to move toward a business environment that is greener.

If you want to implement a shred-everything policy in your business, it's easy. Build a relationship with an on-site document shredding company. They'll be happy to put a locked container or several in your place of business, and they'll make sure that your documents are shredded without anyone having an opportunity to get any data off of them. When you remove the potential for human error and reduce the ease of deliberate crime, everything is safer.

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