Investing in Professional Shredding is a Smart Move

Good investments yield high returns. Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” It’s true that educating yourself by doing the necessary research and analysis before making an investment decision has a great payoff.

When your company generates private information, you are responsible for protecting it and making sure that it is removed from your files and properly destroyed at the right time. Investing in the right shredding company is an important choice. In this blog, we explain why investing in professional shredding is a smart move.

Proper Disposal

A professional shredding company will help you comply with the final disposition dates required by law by shredding your documents on the schedule you agree upon, either through recurring scheduled shredding or one-time purge shredding. They can also serve as a resource to assist you with retention periods for the specific information that you are handling.

Productivity

Investing in a professional shredding company can help to increase your staff’s productivity. When your employees are responsible for shredding, a lot of valuable work time is now spent standing over the shredding machine slowly feeding it paper, fixing jams, and waiting for it to cool down. If you have a lot of shredding, this could cost your business by cutting into productivity and revenue generation. Although it may seem cheaper to DIY shred, in the long run, working with a reputable, local shredding company is more affordable.

Compliance

When you work with a shredding company, they will ensure an unbroken chain of custody from pickup to the destruction of your documents and give you a Certificate of Destruction for third-party, written proof that you are in compliance with state and federal data privacy laws. Failure to get this independent certification can result in fines, legal issues, and damage to your brand and the trust of your clients. Letting the professionals handle your shredding is a smart move.

Prevent Identity Theft

According to the FBI, over 100,000 identity theft and personal data breaches occur every year. This doesn’t include similar crimes that go unreported. With very little information, an identity thief has the ability to piece together enough data to take over a person’s financial accounts. When this happens, resolving it is a very long, painful process.

State and federal laws continue to focus a great deal of attention on identity theft, focusing on and limiting what information businesses can collect, use, and share. When you invest in professional shredding and follow a “shred everything” policy to remove any decision making from the process, you prevent private information from piling up or being tossed into the recycling bin or trash.

Shredding and Recycling in One

In addition to all of the other problems with DIY shredding, the chances are high that you won’t even be able to recycle your shredded paper. This is because many waste management companies cannot take shredded paper at the curbside or in paper recycling dumpsters. Shredded material will then end up in the landfill where it will decompose into chemicals in the soil and greenhouse gases in the air, missing the opportunity to be recycled into new paper products. Think of all the trees that could be saved by recycling all of your discarded documents through your shredding company.

A Better Investment

GreenServ’s professional shredding services helps businesses in Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas stay compliant and productive. For more information or a free shredding quote, call us at 662-533-0940 or complete the form on this page.