Shredding.

The mobile shredding services I've seen have an engine driven shredder mounted in a truck, and your documents get shredded on the spot.

Worth it if you have a lot, probably. Would they shred 100 tons of your confidential docs for £25?

There are outfits that sell you a bag that you can put some amount of such waste in, for £5 (up to about 20kg, IIRC). You then drop the bag back with them and they will guarantee to shred in within the next two hours.

That's good if you generate small amounts of such waste.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk:

At work there was a service where a bloke came and collected documents for burning!

However, he was once the Head of Security - so maybe he had integrity.

Not a mobile service, though. You can take things to them and watch it being done. That's really going to save you time.

Perhaps be OK if it were aimed at companies. But then I'd expect a large company to have their own large shredder.

The ones I've seen (and more often heard) do come to site, 7 tonne truck style.

But I doubt that IronMountain et al are going to be touting for business on facebook.

I've seen NHS records depts that doe have their own shredders, but others just seem to have those letter-box style "confidential waste" bins, that get emptied infrequently and probably have weak locks on them, maybe even a jigsaw would get you in the base without anyone noticing!

There's personal data, and there's sensitive personal data. The NHS data is likely to be in the second category. However, it has no commercial value, so a weak lock is probably adequate.

I assumed it was pretty costly to get such an ad to appear on facebook. Unless you'd been doing a search for such things, which I hadn't.

A colleague once dropped something in the confidential waste bin he then decided he wanted back, so we picked it up and shook it upside down until what he wanted fell out. Along with a lot of other stuff.

We used to have one as I did the shredding of exams scrips and the like, took quite a few hours over a couple of days. We had to shred CDs/DVDs too . Not sure what they do now, I've seen wheelie pins with confidentail waste written on them and they get collected by someone/company I'm not really involved in that now so stay clear of it.

I'm not sure it is as Dave Gorman (comedian) set one up and targeted a few hundred people in canada I think to get them to enter a music picture quiz I think it only cost him about £40 to do it. It wasnlt the £100s I'd have expected.

I;ev found the quiz but.....

I bet! That stuff's not really confidential. Why can't it just go into the recycle bin at the local dump?

No idea but surely peoples exam papers shouldn't be just avaible to whoever wants them.

At the PPoE, we kept exam scripts for quite a long time. We did have a shredder, but for high volume stuff (as when I cleared my office) we filled strong reusable bags which were then sealed and taken away by a specialist security shredding company. Since we were generating anything up to 2000 separate exam scripts per year ... not to mention all the other stuff!

Ithought the whole point of shredding was that you could prove you had shredded them. If somebody else does it it would need to be somebody I had trust in.

The rather strange thing also is that at least here, if I shred my paper, I cannot recycle it any more. What is needed is some process that removes the toner or ink or smears it about so the long fibres of the paper are preserved to allow recycling. Brian

We can put shredded paper in our 'brown' composting bin (along with cardboard and garden waste).

I assume that nobody goes through reading the stuff at the local dump, but even if they did what harm would it do? They would need specialist knowledge to understand the scripts and in any case they wouldn't know the candidates.

Probbaly not but if the scripts are left at the top of the stairwell or in the lift by the cleaners in a black bin liner..... anyone could get them.

That could apply to medical records too and bank statements.

Most of the ones I saw had the candidtates name written on the top.

And therein lies the snag. You have to trust those - likely on minimum wage - who collect the stuff from you. You may as well just trust your dustman and the council who dispose of it.

Our council (Nottinghamshire) tells us that shredded paper is OK in our recycling bins.

When I visited the sorting facility recently, we saw that an early stage of the process was a 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