Creatrope

Shred-It is hosting ‘community shreds’ at various venues around the U.S.

This is a good (free) opportunity to purge paper from your house.
Securely (and environmentally-sensitively) destroying one of the 1.51 cu ft ‘book boxes’ of data can run you about $25. If you’ve ever sat down to destroy one of the boxes through a consumer-grade shredder, this is a bargain, but free is even better.

Here’s the events near Seattle.

They are typically hosted in Office Depots and banks.

Preparing for a ‘Shred’

What would be the worse thing that could happen if you couldn’t lay your hands on that piece of paper again? Learn about document retention guidelines and take the opportunity to clear your house of unwanted paper.

Convert Paper to Electronic Where Appropriate

I’ve managed to clear out a lot of paper recently by signing up for online billing for a few services. The company saves money by not mailing you statements, so as a ‘quid pro quo’, the will often make accessible years worth of old statements. I then save the PDFs of the old bills for the things I think are worthwhile (like bank statements, but not utilities). The older statements will usually ‘rotate off’ after some time (years). Unfortunately, most of these sites do not have a sophisticated way to automatically download fresh statements, so once I’ve ‘caught up’, I make a calendar entry to catch up again in another year or so.

Saving the PDFs directly from the source may or may not be easier than scanning in the documents. I prefer the PDFs from the source where possible as the old statements can be physically challenging to scan.

Once you are caught up, you can revert to paper billing if that works better for you.

The paper version of the statements can then all be shredded.

If it’s truly important not to lose the info, then you should apply reasonable practices in backing up the data and securing the data.

Attend the Shred

You might check to see if there’s a ‘maximum’ you can bring. I called about an earlier one and they allowed one of the ‘book boxes’ per person in line. I don’t know if that’s standard or just the locale near me. If it’s one person per box, you may want to adjust your strategy. One location was up to one 32-gallon garbage container, which is lot of paper.