We Recycle!

Update: Effective Sept. 2019 Total Secure Shredding is no longer accepting E-waste. We will continue to accept computer towers and laptops only in conjunction with hard drive destruction. We regret the inconvenience and invite you to check out our other services.

Hey Folks,

I’ve been sitting around for the last week wondering what the next blog should be about.

After looking around on the website to see what I’ve all covered, it dawned on me that I’ve never talked about recycling.

And the funny thing is that just about every person that comes down to our facility for paper shredding asks us, “So what do you do with all the shredded paper?”

The simple answer is that all the shredded paper gets bailed and recycled.

It’s a pretty cool situation since not only are you making sure that you are protecting your identity by getting everything shredded, you’re at the same time making sure none of these documents are taking up valuable space in the landfill.

Second, the recycling results in the final and complete destruction of your shredded documents as they are turned into new paper fiber products.

It’s one of those “Win-Win” situations!

However, this does present one problem…

I do keep a close eye on what is allowed to get mixed in with the paper.

One of the biggest sticking points we run into is x-rays that are contained within paper patient files.

It doesn’t take very many x-rays within a full load of paper to significantly diminish the recyclability of the entire load.

Consequently, there’s been more than one customer I’ve lost (or refused to take on) because they had x-rays mixed in with their paper.

It’s not practical to try to shred everything on-site while at the same time trying to separate out the x-rays for separate destruction.

I typically recommend that we provide off-site shredding services in these instances so that we can take the documents back to our facility, remove the x-rays, shred the paper documents, and then destroy the x-rays separately.

Of course, that means a lot of extra work… Which means extra cost… Which means we charge double to perform this service!

It’s kind of a bummer when the customer is faced with removing the x-rays themselves, the additional cost we charge is often a lot less then doing it yourself.

And, since I’m on the topic of what should and should not be included with your paper documents when it comes to shredding, here’s a list I’ve put together over the years:

What can be Shredded: