5 Reasons Why Paper Shredding Is Important

Paper shredding plays a crucial role in protecting sensitive information, and it has been around for hundreds of years. It all started with a basic manual tearing of paper with hands.

However, paper shredding has evolved in modern times, with the corporate world using high-profile, complex shredding machines to destroy sensitive and confidential documents.

In this blog post, you’ll know five reasons why paper shredding is important.

 5 Reasons Why Paper Shredding Is Important

Here are five reasons why it’s important to shred your documents:

1. Prevents Identity Theft

According to statistics by the Aite-Novarica Group, 47% of people in America were victims of identity theft in 2020. In addition, the group’s U.S Identity Theft report suggests that identity theft cases significantly increased (42%) from 2019 to 2020 (costing $502.5 billion in 2019 and $712.4 billion in 2020).

Therefore, it’s essential to shred unwanted documents in order to protect your business, employees, and customers. At the same time, it’s vital to store such documents in a protected location as long as they’re in your possession.

2. It’s a Requirement

According to law, every business needs to ensure the privacy of its staff and customers. There’s no doubt hard copies of personal data are more accessible than those stored in the organization’s database and encrypted with passwords. Therefore, it’s vital to abide by the law to prevent confidential information from falling into the wrong hands.

On top of that, the government has set up penalties for companies that fail to comply with these regulations. There can be fines of as much as four percent of global turnover.

3. Clears Space

Some companies tend to hoard old, outdated, and irrelevant documents in their offices. While sometimes this is mistaken as record keeping, mostly, it comes from a lack of proper ways to dispose of unwanted and irrelevant documents.

This is where paper shredding comes into play. It allows companies to free up desks, cabinets, and other storage spaces by shredding no longer needed documents.

4. Eliminates Fire Hazards

Piles of paper on desks and other storage spaces can increase the risk of a fire breaking out. Organizations need to dispose of unwanted documents to prevent such issues.

Many companies have paper shredders and designate an employee to destroy unwanted documents using those paper shredders. However, it’s best to hire a professional shredding service since it’s a cost-effective approach that helps shred documents efficiently and professionally.

5. Makes the Environment Better

Unfortunately, papers are made from trees. The more we need paper, the more trees have to be cut down, increasing global warming.

However, we can prevent this by hiring a professional shredding service to destroy our documents. Shredding services ensure that all the shredded paper is recycled so that fewer trees are cut down to produce paper.

The Final Verdict

Gone are the days when people manually tore papers with their hands. Today, we have high-quality paper shredders in offices to destroy our confidential documents. Paper shredding has become vital for every business these days, providing them with benefits such as preventing identity theft, eliminating fire hazards, clearing up space, and so on. If you’re unsure, look at the five reasons mentioned above to understand why paper shredding is important.