Hidden Shredding Fees to Watch Out For
It’s common to have paper shredder in your office to destroy documents with confidential information. While you may think that keeping an office shredder in your office is cheaper than hiring an outside company to shred your documents, you could be wrong. Continue reading to learn the hidden shredding fees to watch out for.
Equipment Costs
Buying a paper shredder does not only include the initial purchase of the machine. You will also have to pay for maintenance, cleaning, and replacement costs. Cleaning will also be necessary since paper shredders can produce fine dust that can harm your employee’s health.
Employee Time
There is a decent amount of time that goes into shredding paper. Employees will need to remove any staples or paper clips, arrange stacks of paper to be shredded, feed paper into the shredded to prevent jams, empty the bucket of shreds, and clean after the shredding process is complete. If an employee spends just 2 hours a month shredding documents, they will add up to three business days of productivity loss for the entire year.
The Environment
If your company aims to be sustainable and lower their carbon footprint, in-house shredding can be holding you back. Even if you do your best to recycle, in-house shredding can lead to excess waste. An environmentally conscious shredding company like EcoShredding can help prevent pollution, save energy with the right equipment, and recycle raw materials.
User Error
By shredding documents in the office, employees must decide which documents to dispose of. However, leaving this task up to employees could lead to information security issues. Due to the nature of human error, documents can be lost, leading to a data breach.
Security and Ineffective Shredding
Companies shred their documents for security purposes. But if your shredding process is not secure, you can risk a data breach. A document could easily be missed in the shredding process, or a box of documents could sit waiting to be shred for a long period of time, leaving confidential information at risk.
Most office level shredders create long strips from the shredded papers that can easily be put back together to recreate the paper. If someone were to retrieve the shreds, they could easily put the documents back together, causing a security breach. If a security breach occurs, your company’s reputation can be at stake.
Legal Risks
There are multiple Federal regulations in the United States that can hold a company liable for not properly protecting confidential information, including HIPAA, FACTA, FERPA, GBL, & Sarbanes-Oxley, depending on your industry. Very few employees that perform document disposal have the proper training in record retention and record disposal. There is also limited proof of secure document disposal when it is performed in the office.
These costs can be avoided by utilizing a document disposal service like EcoShredding. At EcoShredding, we offer a convenient, secure, and environmentally friendly document destruction service so you do not have to worry about shredding documents in-house. Get your free quote for shredding services today on our website!
Sources:
https://higherinfogroup.com/the-hidden-costs-of-shredding-documents-onsite/
