A comparison between buying a home shredder and utilising a shredding service
In the last few years, more and more people have begun working from home and, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, this is now the case more than ever. Even after the pandemic ends, experts are already predicting the home office will become a permanent feature of working life. Barclays boss said recently: “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past”, and Twitter has become one of the first companies to come out and say “if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen”. But this shift in the way we work will undeniably mean we also have more confidential data within our homes. And, to protect ourselves and the companies we work for, as well as to comply with GDPR, this data must be looked after. So, when you no longer require a confidential document, it needs to be securely shredded and disposed of correctly. With this in mind, the big question is: do you get a home shredder and do it yourself or do you opt for a professional shredding service to do it for you? Below, we’ve outlined 4 reasons why the answer is the latter…
Protection
The whole point of shredding is to protect your sensitive information and prevent against identity theft, data breaches and fraud. Unfortunately, with home shredders you get what you pay for. The cheap offerings tend to only cut in one direction, meaning with a little patience and persistence, a criminal can easily piece the papers back together again and get hold of the information. These types of shredder are also more prone to breaking down – and, with a broken shredder, it’s difficult to safely shred your documents.
A professional shredding service, on the other hand, will have industrial-sized machinery that uses cross cut technology to shred the paper down into tiny squares that are impossible to reconstruct. This, combined with high security vehicles and facilities, plus security vetted staff, makes for a much better way of protecting your information during disposal.
Cost
On first glance, we understand how a home shredder can seem like the cheaper option; it looks like it’s just one simple upfront cost and then you’ve got a shredding system in place. However, in reality, home shredders tend to end up being far more expensive than this. As touched on earlier, you get what you pay for – cheaper shredders are highly unlikely to do as good a job as a more expensive one, but investing in a decent shredder will cost you. And, on top of this, you’ve got the maintenance and repairs to pay for.
With a professional shredding service, you just pay for what you need when you need it, and they’ll have their own shredding machinery, so you don’t need to worry about maintenance and repairs either.
Time
People often buy a home shredder for convenience, but looking after the shredding yourself can leave you with a time-consuming task on your hands, and ultimately ends up being wholly inconvenient. This is because home shredders usually only allow a handful of papers to be shredded at a time, so someone has to stand over the shredder feeding the paper in manually. And you can imagine how long that takes!
With a professional shredding service, they’ll come to your home or office, collect the confidential documents and shred these for you. All the while, you can get on with what you’re paid to do, without the worry you’re losing time stood by a shredder.
Disposal
When talking about confidential data disposal, it’s easy to focus on the shredding and forget that this isn’t the end of the process. Shredded paper doesn’t just disappear – it turns into non-identifiable paper that needs disposing of itself. If you use a home shredder, you will need to find a way to get rid of this leftover paper, and the responsible and most eco-friendly thing to do would be to recycle it. If you’re lucky, you can just put the paper in your home recycling bin, but many councils don’t accept shredded paper for recycling. So you’ll need to find somewhere that does, such as a recycling plant, but this will cost you money (and time getting there and back!).
By hiring a professional shredding service, you’ll get the peace of mind that they’re protecting your information as well as the environment. They’ll shred your documents and, once destroyed, send them on to paper mills to be recycled back into other paper-based products, such as books and copier paper.
If you’re working from home at the moment and have a build-up of confidential documents you want to dispose of securely, we can help. Via our home shredding service, you can either watch your documents be destroyed on your doorstep or we can safely transport them to our high security shredding facility and destroy them there, the choice is yours. To get in touch, just give us ring on 01242 588600 or email us at info@printwaste.co.uk.
