We have a couple of boxes of A4 plus lots of little bits which need shredding. All confidential. Far too many to do through an average office shredder. Far too many to feed into a fire.
Options seem to be short term hire of a shredder or use a shredding company who come to your door.
Has anyone successfully tackled this?
Cheers
Dave R
Bonfire, old rubbish bin with holes in, hydrochloric acid, soak in a bleach solution,
I needed to get shot of a bunch of paper recently, and got a local shredding firm to come and pick it up. They took away two wheelie bins worth. They can also leave bags for you to fill at your leisure if you want.
This was the lot I used:
??? farmer here disposed of 40 cut tree brances in 4 large fires :-)
Power tools. feed em into a blender? under a ride on mower? angle grinder? So many tools so little time
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How many of these have you done recently?
Cheers
Dave R
all. not necessarily for paper though.
I think Id hire a mini digger and bury them,.
(1) I think the size of your garden and mine are probably different.
(2) That leaves me the problems of what to do with the soil.
(3) Don't archaeologist dig up the remains of documents decades/centuries later?
Seriously, though, these papers require secure destruction and individual A4 sheets are notoriously difficult to burn in bulk.
Cheers
Dave R
If you are working, could you take them to work and filter them into the office's confidential waste? If you ask first, they probably won't mind. Or maybe someone else could to do this.
I had a lot of confidential waste to clear out when I was throwing away out-of-date financial records etc. I used an office shredder and had to accept that every few shredder-binfuls of waste I'd have to stop for a few hours to let the shredder cool down so the thermal cutout cut back in. Tedious.
What was worse was having the local tip go apeshit when I poured a bin-bag of shreddings into the waste paper skip. Apparently the industrial shredder that they use for shredding paper prior to pulping can't cope with paper that is already shredded. Ah diddums, poor ickle shredder :-(
So I took the remaining shreddings home and kept the bag until we moved into a new house where they could be added to a compost bin.
If buried, they would rot pretty quickly. You only need the pages to stick together, etc. Unless these are state secrets, it's not a big problem. Who's going to go to enormous lengths to read your old bank statements, after all?
Just chuck out a few dozen pages per week, sealed inside old food containers in your normal rubbish. This will either go to landfill or more likely to an incinerator anyway. Manually tear off any names or numbers if you are paranoid.
Unless you have been up to something, no-one is going to sift through your general rubbish, whereas blue-bins full of paper/card/plastic/tins will have their contents sent along a conveyor for manual sorting.
That's also the case for blue-bins for household recycling. Shredded paper is not allowed simply because of the mess it makes on their own manual conveyor sorting lines. Also it gets wrapped around the drums that power the driving belts.
That's a slightly odd response to someone who spent time trying to help you. I use the first 2 regularly, bleach solution a long time ago (worked moderately well, but slow), a chemist pal told me to try HCL but I didn't need to.
There's an outfit in Deal which will give you bags for £5 each. You can put up to 17kg of paper, old CD/DVD, into the bag and take it back to them for secure shredding.
I expect there are others elsewhere.
What I've done, is take a number of pages, roll them up together, then flatten a bit, and twist them. A big stack of them will burn surprisingly well that way. Do it on a still day, or use a metal bin with air holes. Takes time, but it's secure.
"This stuff is so confidential we _have_ to destroy it. Above all, it must not end up in the wrong hands."
"Give it to these people, they say we can trust them."
Decades ago, our security officer had an arrangement with a local hospital.
Every now and then, he would go over there and personally feed the stuff into their furnace.
Modern furnaces might be more fussy about their diet, but if they use it to destroy medical waste, a few bits of paper shouldn't be a problem.
We are permitted to put shredded paper in our recycling bins.
When I visited our local sorting facility, we saw the trommel screen which removed all small "contamination" which then went straight to landfill. This would clearly pass any crosscut paper shreddings.
I queried this, and they said that I was correct, but they felt that it was psychologically better to encourage recycling.
Chris
Printed paper will burn and produce reasonable heat, but it makes a lot of ash.
Glossy mags simply wont.
I wonder whether the sort of serious shredders used for tree waste would work.
Oh. Apparently they will.
Lots of instructions on line., You can buyta simple shredder for £150 or so, or hire up to 40hp ones
Big bonfire in a grotty old Chiminea. Burnt about 4x A4 printer paper boxes (2500 sheets?) of old credit card bills, bank statements and such going back over 20 years last week. It took a few hours. Cost nothing but time and matches. It was nice to sit on a cold and sunny day in the garden with the Memsahib chatting and drinking tea whilst we stoked the flames.
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