Nuts and bolts of paper shredding

Regardless of how big or small your company is, if you store information that holds peoples personal data such as names, addresses, account numbers bank details, medical records etc, you have the same obligation to ensure that when the time comes, information is destroyed effectively so that no details can be retrieved from the documents once it leaves your premises.

As soon as you take personal details from any client, the format you hold that information on is always under the protection of the company who stores that information, that includes when it is on the premises as well as when it leaves the premises destroyed. If any information is discovered at a later date, the company is still held liable regarding the protection of that information.

Smaller businesses may think that they do not have enough paper documents which may warrant using a specialised offsite company to destroy their data, however, any small amount of paper documents still come under the same data protection laws and are therefore just as important when it comes to destruction as are the larger companies who hold more information.


For smaller companies who may think that using offsite companies is too costly, there are a variety of ways that an offsite company can be used. It may not be necessary to arrange for the offsite company itself to destroy the information, instead, you can be provided with a security container; which means you can dispose of documents which are no longer required to be kept by law, and these can be collected once or twice a month by the offsite company who can then ensure destruction complies with the data protection laws.

This may prove to be a much cheaper solution, especially when you take into consideration the cost of small office shredders, which not only break down but also place time constraints of productivity on employees who have to take time away from their work to ensure that information is destroyed.

Many businesses prefer to use offsite companies for their paper document storage as well as destruction since these companies specialise in the safe destruction of all information and there is less risk when it comes to disposing the information once it is destroyed.

The cost using an offsite company is not restricted to using the services themselves, when considering the costs, you would also need to take into account the cost of an office shredder, what happens when the office shredder breaks down, what is the cost to employees time when it comes to shredding information as well as ensuring the information is disposed of correctly, what is the cost to the company's reputation should information be retrieved at a later date because there was a mistake in how that information was disposed of.

These are all things that need to be taken into account and these are just some of the reasons why many small, mid and large companies choose to use an offsite company when it comes to ensuring that their business is safe from data protection laws when it comes to destroying and disposing of sensitive data when it is no longer required to be stored.

nickyb