Shredding Services' Industrial Machines: An FAQ

What Is an Industrial Paper Shredder? A professional shredding services' industrial paper shredder is a machine that slices, tears, and grinds material -- usually, but not necessarily, paper -- and compresses the result into large rectangular bales for easy storage. Industrial shredders differ from your typical office shredder in that instead of cutting paper into ribbon strips or even crosscut sections, an industrial paper shredder grinds your paper, leaving no pattern or even discernable shreds.

Whatever is being shredded first gets dropped onto a conveyor belt, which dumps that material off onto the stainless steel grinding heads, which destroy the material and then empties into a baler. The baler crams the remnants together into a large block, and a human takes the block and packs it into the back of the truck to be stored until their next stop at the recycling plant.

What Else Can a Professional Shredder Destroy? The top of the line shredders can annhilate about two thousand sheets of paper at a time -- but they can also destroy almost any electronic waste (eWaste) as well. If you have floppy disks, stiffy disks, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, Laserdiscs, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, aluminum cans, Pendaflex folders, carbon ribbon cassettes, VHS tapes, and in the case of the best models, even hard drives, well, those aren't a problem either.

What Does Such a Shredder Cost? There are a variety of factors that go into the cost of these shredders, not the least of which is that most of them come mounted on a truck, and the cost of the truck isn't included in the cost of the shredder. But if you already have a truck, you can expect to pay somewhere between $10,000 and $18,000 for a high-quality professional-grade shredder.

Then you have to pay for the gas to run it and someone to get the resultant bales over to a recycler's. It's almost always more cost effective, unless you can keep the machine busy all by yourself, to split the cost between several local businesses by hiring a shredding services to take care of that part of the operation for you. They'll generally charge you somewhere between $.20 and $1.00 per pound shredded.

How Fast Is an Industrial Shredder? Depending on the material being shredded and a few other factors such as how efficiently the shredder is currently working, you can expect any industrial shredder to be able to process about 750 pounds of waste per hour -- or possibly up to three times that under ideal conditions. Even at the minimum rate, that's about 15 large-sized ('about what a grown man can handle getting out to the truck') boxes of paperwork every hour.

How Much Shredding Does My Company Actually Need? The typical US office worker creates about fifty sheets of paperwork per day, all of which should be shredded under the ideal 'shred-everything' policy. That load includes self-generated documents, printed emails, items purged from filing cabinets, and so on. Across a five-day workweek, that's 250 sheets, or about 2.5 pounds of shredding. So if your company employs 70 office workers, that'll come to around 175 pounds of shredding each week. Assuming an average rate of $.35/pound, that'll come to just over $60 of shredding each week. At that rate, you'd need to save up for about four years to afford an industrial shredder for your business, during which time you'd have to pay to store all that paperwork in preparation for the Big Shred.

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