The Economics

Calculate The cost of shredding

The Costs of Your Office Shredder vs. Using EcoShredding Service

The manufacturers that sell paper shredders to purchase for your business argue that it saves you money to buy or lease their paper shredding equipment. We disagree.

But rather than a pointless argument, it makes sense to look at the math and accurately determine the real costs to use a shredding service versus buying an office shredder. To make it easy, we’ll compare two simple options. A single office shredding machine with one staff member versus a shredding service like ours.

The following calculations assumes an average Administrative Assistant paid $18.98 per hour (median Salary in Atlanta) spends approximately 10 minutes per day shredding paper. In reality, the average minutes per day in front of a shredder would be even more if companies were truly compliant.

Here’s some reasons why it takes so much time.

  1. The time spent feeding small numbers of documents into shredding machine. Most office shred machines have clear limits on the amount of paper that can be
  2. The time spent dealing with and removing the clips, staples and extras. Most office shred equipment requires clean paper and do not easily process folders, larger clips and stapled sets of paper.
  3. The time spent dealing with malfunctioning equipment. Inevitably, the small machines get clogged, jammed or break. This requires an immediate decision by the employee. Find another shredder option, or risk a breach by discarding the paper.
  4. The preparation time. Consolidate the papers and files. prepare the equipment. Get coffee to avoid the task because everyone hates doing it.

Given the 10 minutes a day, over 21 working days, that equates to 3.5 hours per month of shredding at $18.98 per hour. So that’s $66.43 of labor per month plus the cost of the shredding equipment, annualized conservatively at $20 per month for a total of $86.43 per month.

Compare that to a single collection container in your office costing you almost half that amount and you can see why it just doesn’t make sense to do it yourself.

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