Burning Paper as alternative to shredder. Other ways to securely destroy documents

Of course. Or as one online persona titled himself Violent Elizabeth Bott.

I was merely continuing the theme of misspelt, and or wrong words started by the poster I quoted

And |IIRC adding an egrave accent:

Voilà!

The high quality paper generates more ash than wood or coal.

NB you should keep records going back 7 years.

Smartass ;)

A few years ago I cleared out my old bank statements and utility bills and sent it all for recycling 'as is'. I have better things to do with my time than putting any further effort into the disposal and my feeling there would be no unwanted consequences turned out to be correct.

HINT: "Viola" was intentional, hence the winking smiley.

OK, you got me. :-)

Well, Good for you. Actually the most time consuming bit was stopping to read all the decades old credit card transactions, and recalling  the various occasions, holiday trips, and expensive car repairs they related to!

I dont give a damn about all that. I don't even get paper statements any more. I check in now and again to make sure there is nothing going on I need to know about and that's the end of that. Any archives are scanned and PDFed and the paper binned

And you seen learn to hate those companies like Aviva who insist on changing the page layout at every change of manager (who needs to be seen to be doing 'something') so that it is difficult to tear your name+address etc off several in one go.

Too smooth, bad as the old ?Bronco stuff.

If burning, put it the back of the fire, it burns slowly. Very few diyers will have the equipment to pulp it.

The problem is, getting enough air to it. An old stainless steel automatic washer tub is ideal, once lit, air gets too it from all round. Three bits of angle iron bolted to it, lifts it off the ground. Best incinerator money can buy, and they are usually dumped.

In the Inland Revenue, when I worked for them, we always told Taxpayers to keep the past five years plus the current year. That was 30 years ago. Things might have changed since then. Peter

That's what I used to do when I ran a small office. Big plastic bin. Soak for a couple of days. I had a briqette press:

Bronco was fine if you crinkled it first.

You'll probably get through it with your shredded in a while: my shredder has a thermal cut out after about 30 mins of continual shredding.

My local council's blue bin will not take shredding paper (it kills their processing plant, apparently, and when it's been shredded it's too small to be useful for recycling). The local HWRC will take it in its paper skip (provided the shreddings are in a _paper_ bag/sack so they don't blow around), which then gets burnt for heating or energy reclamation (whatever that is). That's the best I can do with shreddings.

Personally, I would keep old bank statements for 7 years. I scan them, or if you have online banking, the bank will often have downloadable pdfs. HMRC (if it's feeling awkward) can go back 7 years. Also, your executors may need to go back 7 years.

I have a neighbour that likes to burn lots of things in his garden incinerator (rather than take it to the recycling) and the rest of us get the smelly smoke (when he goes out for the rest of the afternoon)....