What to shred?

What should you shred?

Documents in paper form are everywhere. You have them at your residence and at the office. You print them and they come in the mail. The use of paper is still growing and will continue for years to come. So what needs to be securely destroyed? In a word everything, the reason is simple fifty percent of every document has information contained in them that requires they be shredded before disposal. So how do you choose what to shred or not? The time it will take to review every individual piece of paper would be tremendous along with the possibility of human error and throwing away something that needs to be shredded first.

There are two reasons you should shred every piece of paper.

1. The first reason is more than half of every document has a piece of information on them that federal and state privacy laws require they be shredded before they are disposed of so that information is no longer accessible. So it pays to play it safe and shred everything. Also some documents that you may not realize have enough of your information in them for identity thieves to use to steal someone’s identity like junk mail. So every paper document no matter what it is should be shredded.

2. The second reason is you will save yourself a lot of time and eliminate the possibility of making a mistake. The time it will take you to review every single page to determine if it should be shredded will be enormous and you have better and more productive things to do with your time. Also you are going to make a mistake and some point because it is such a monotonous task to have to review every single page. The costs of for making a mistake with the fines and penalties for violating a privacy law along with the loss of confidence in your company could be devastating. There is no question that the best course of action is to shred everything!