The Office shredder dilemma

I remember the first day when I opened the office as in most cases I believe back then there would be only one person occupying that office, by office I mean a person or people running a business.

Many of us start offices without even having a physical office, we call it starting from zero. We find ourselves with the first document which could be a sole proprietorship certificate or partnership deed or even a certificate of incorporation for a limited company, with one file or no file. 

Then we start accumulating paper documents, contracts, offer letters, invoices, permits, receipts, tender documents et al.

Then we start buying files and categorizing the documents to their specific files. Then maybe we move into a physical office if we didn’t have one initially.

Then we start accumulating documents including duplicated ones and then we purchase a filing cabinet for storing these documents, then 2 cabinets, then 3 documents and now we have to create space for the cabinets storing essential and unnecessary documents. The number of staff also increases, meaning more documents.

As time goes by one year turns to two years, to three years and so on and so forth. Documents keep on piling as the digital born documents are converted into paper based documents.

Then we realize we have to dispose of some documents and we can not just throw them into the dustbins because they are confidential and we don’t want our private information to be public information. We buy an office shredder to sort out the public private issue.

You remember that office shredder that nobody wanted to use? To sort out the documents then shred them one by one is a task nobody likes. Document shredding can be a dull and non fulfilling work. We used to have an office shredder that was rarely used and yet we had a pile up of documents to be shredded. Everybody avoided that shredder-like plaque.

The shredder would shred a few documents and overheat which meant we had to wait for it to cool again before continuing. We were placing ten documents at a time to avoid clogging the shredder and ensure that all the staples, clips and office pins were removed.

And for the large format documents we had to cut them into small manageable sizes before shredding. This meant the preparation time was taking even more time than the shredding. It was not an interesting job. And afterwards you would have shredded waste that you didn’t know where to take.

With the commercial shredders the Pre preparation is not necessary and it can take huge quantities of paper reducing time spent on shredding. Outsourcing shredding works saves the business time which can be used in other productive work.

You also have the option of choosing whether you want it off site or on site, Having your office shredding done on a monthly basis or just one time on request.

The shredded waste is then recycled to be reused again.