BookmarkAll About Paper Shredders
Constructive Destruction
The first paper shredder was likely someone in ancient Egypt who worked for the inventor of papyrus. It seems logical that with the ease of recording ones thoughts and information came the 20/20 hindsight that it may not be so wise to keep such documents.
How To Shred
Ever since, the threat of an exposed document and the need for safe disposal remains. Traditional methods such as burning and flushing may be fine occasionally, but for the higher volume workplace or household, a more viable method is in order. Shredding has emerged to be the logical method.
Within this blanket designation though there are several ways in which the shredding of documents is achieved. The most popular methods of shredding either reduce the paper to actual streamer type shreds or grind the paper into particulate matter. Stripcut and crosscut machines are mostly found in home paper shredders, mini paper shredders and some office paper shredders.
Scoring highest in paper shredding reviews and ratings, commercial paper shredders are those that employ particlecut, disintigrators, and granulators. These are used by not only office paper shredders but also industrial and heavy duty paper shredders. These types churn the paper, cutting it repeatedly until it falls through a mesh screen.
Hammermills and pulverizers are the method used by high security paper shredders. These types usually reduce the paper down to the consistency of household dust. Some other methods of shredding use chemical decomposition, composting and incinerators.
Unshredding the Shredded
The need for shredding, has given rise to an entire industry populated by brand names such as Royal, Fellowes and Aurora. Be careful though because unshredding has become sophisticated as well. During the Iran hostage crisis, the revolutionary government employed carpet weavers to reconstruct shredded documents from the American embassy.
After the Enron scandal there have been a number of companies who have developed computer imaging solutions for reconstructing documents. There have even been stories of criminal organizations employing the obsessive-compulsive users of methamphetamine to reconstruct documents.
If your information is particularly valuable there are a number of countermeasures to unshredding that you can employ. The first is contract shredding. This is when a company comes by once a week and is charged with the destruction of documents. The advantages of this are that they are often insured and that they remove the documents from the office thus ridding them from the context in which they could have the potential of reconstruction.
One drawback is that the time between pickup and shredding can leave open a window for the compromise of security. Another countermeasure would be to simply knead the shreds in order to make it more difficult, as proximity of pieces is often the largest compromise to security a shredded document has.