5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Shredding Services

You may have seen shredding bins at your bank or doctor’s office, but you’re not sure if outsourced shredding can offer any benefits to a business like yours. You may be wondering if you and your employees have been feeding documents into paper shredding machines for far too long. Here are five ways your business can benefit from shredding services:

1. Privacy Protection

In-house shredding programs are filled with security risks. If documents aren’t shredded in a timely manner, your business increases its exposure to insider theft. Plus, as soon as a bag of shredded documents is tossed in your dumpster, your information is fair game for dumpster divers.

A shredding service reduces your company’s exposure to internal and external identity theft threats. Your documents are regularly destroyed on-site at your facility or off-site at a shredding plant by screened professionals.

2. Regulatory Compliance

Your business must comply with an alphabet soup of state and federal regulations, including:

• The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• The Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act (FACTA)
• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)
• The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB)
• GA Senate Bill 425
• PCI-DSS

If your document disposal procedures don’t align with the privacy and security requirements of these laws, your company may face stiff fines and reputational damage. A shredding service can help your business avoid these consequences of non-compliance. Your documents are destroyed within a strict chain of custody and a Certificate of Destruction is issued after each shredding project.

3. Increased Employee Productivity

In many businesses, a significant amount of time is spent shredding documents. Since office shredders are not made to handle large volumes of paper, your staff may spend several hours a month in front of a shredding machine instead of working on more important responsibilities.

A shredding service helps your employees focus on essential, profit-driving tasks. Your shredding provider brings secure, bar-coded collection containers to your office. Your employees can deposit unwanted documents into the containers without having to remove staples, paperclips, or sticky notes. When the containers are full, a uniformed and background-screened service representative scans each bar code and records the container’s fill level. Then your documents are shredded on-site in a mobile shredding vehicle or securely transported to off-site to a shredding plant for destruction.

4. Cost Savings

In-house shredding isn’t cheap, especially when you calculate employee wages and shredder operation, depreciation, and maintenance costs. It can cost your business several hundred dollars a month. A shredding service provider helps you save money by eliminating these office shredding expenses.

5. Paper Waste Reduction

Businesses big and small generate vast amounts of waste. According to the US Chamber of Commerce, for every million dollars a company makes, it generates an average of 7.8 tons of waste, 40% of which is paper waste. A shredding service helps your organization reduce paper waste and minimize its environmental impact. After destroying your documents, your shredding provider bales the shredded particles and sends them to a trusted recycling partner.

Records Management Center provides businesses throughout Augusta, Evans, Thomson, Martinez, GA, Aiken, SC, and the Central Savannah River Area with professional shredding and destruction solutions.