Creatrope

With identity theft on the rise, trimming your collection of papers with highly personal information on them is beneficial. It makes it easier to find your important papers as well.

These papers should not just go into the garbage, they should be destroyed. Shredding is a popular option, but if you’ve ‘deferred’ this task for a while, you might find this volume of shredding beyond the capability of the $20 Office Depot special.

Your remaining shredding options are:

* Tediously shred a few papers at a time with your $20 special
* Buy a real shredder
* Hire a bonded shredding service
* Find a free Community Shred

The professional shredding services can do it right in front of you, or even come to your office. The cost might be +/- $10/box for a ‘banker’ box the size of the ones you buy legal reams of papers in at Staples. If you’re willing to leave the boxes behind and have them do it at their leisure it’s cheaper. However, having them destroyed right in front of you might give you additional peace of mind (or not).

They will also come to your house, but the minimum charge is $100 at Shred-It. When they do that, they charge by the minute rather than box. During my conversation with the nice woman there, I learned that this monster chews through boxes pretty quickly, so that the breakeven versus carrying your stuff there is somewhere near a dozen boxes (not to mention the convenience). I understand it’s a fairly serious sized truck, so you might want to keep that in mind.

Why not organize a neighborhood shred?

<–adsense–>

The existence of the last option was a surprise to me. There are companies that are either sponsored by local cities or companies that bring their mobile shredding facility to various public places and then will shred papers from local folks for free.

An example of a company that Community Shreds around Seattle is Shred-It. Interesting, they do not do this in Seattle itself, that’s another company I have yet to locate. As you can see by their schedule they run this fairly often.

I have not attended one, but learned the following by calling them first. I would suggest that you do some investigation before you just show up with a decade worth of paper.

* Generally you can only shred what you walk up with - so a few banker box size boxes or garbage bags would probably be the limit
* There might be large variations in wait line/size depending on the how well promoted the event is.

Shredding, of course, is not your only option, but it feels more attractive ecologically than burning it for instance.