New West Living

Doing the Safety Shred

By Alan Kleinfeld, 10-11-06

With my most recent move, I waded thru my filing cabinets and finally cleared out old check stubs, insurance documents, expired and closed credit account information and even report cards from grade school; stuff I’ve been hauling across country on each move and adding to it along the way.

But with all the media coverage on identity theft, I didn’t want to just toss my personal info onto the curb and hope that Waste Management would take care of it. I had planned to shred it myself using my 7-sheet paper shredder purchased at Office Max for $15. But one credit card and the thing started wining like a five year old who missed naptime.

By the time I cleared everything out, I had two huge boxes of personal garbage that had “sensitive” information in it and I had no intention of spending two weeks sitting cross-legged on the floor trying to put seven sheets at a time through my shredder. Besides, what would I do with old checkbooks and computer disks? To find a solution I went where more and more people are going: the Internet.

And that’s where I found Shred-it. They have these big truck-based, industrial shredders that come to you and obliterate all that sensitive stuff you don’t want getting into the wrong hands. Jim Endicott, General Manager of the local Shred-it, says the company has been in the Albuquerque area since the fall of 2003 and covers West Texas, Southern Colorado, El Paso and New Mexico. The company is global with offices on five continents and 15 countries.

If you have box upon box upon box of stuff, Shred-it will bring it’s hulking shreddin’ truck to you and do it right in front of you. Generally, the minimum is 10 boxes to have them come to you and for $95 they’ll shred up to 25 of your boxes. More than 25 boxes? The fee is then based on a per-box charge.

For those who wish to dispose of a box or two, Shred-it now offers two free monthly shreds to benefit the Police Athletic League and Crime Stoppers. One shred is in the Albuquerque area and the other in an outlying area such as Roswell, Las Vegas, Santa Fe or Las Cruces, to name a few. The public is invited to bring up to three boxes for free shredding. Contact Shred-it at the number below to find out when and where the next community shred takes place.

In my case, I was going to be out of town for the next dozen or so community shreds, so Shred-it invited me to bring my boxes to them and for a nominal charge they crunched my stuff right before my eyes. It was quite relaxing seeing all those previously important documents doing bye-bye. Endicott tossed the first box in and in about 60 or so seconds, my box and all of its contents was toast.

I thought that throwing in a few CDs and DVDs would jam the machine, but Jim tells me that it can even chew up guns. Yikes! I suppose if it can grind a 38 special into steel filings, then there’s no way my expired credit cards would ever survive. Thank gawd.

The shredding process doesn’t actually shred like my office shredder, which does a crosscut shred. These larger contraptions actually tear everything up until it’s like confetti. Once that’s done, the recycling process begins to separate paper and non-paper and eventually ends up at the grocery as recycled paper towels and napkins.

Endicott pointed out that the recycling is done AFTER the shredding. “That’s an important point. We’re focused 100% on the security issue. Our recycling process is done after shredding whereas some shredding companies, in order to make more money on the recycling, will recycle before all the shredding is complete,” he said.

Shred-it has two trucks in the region in operation with a third one already on its way. By 2010, Endicott predicts they’ll have 10 trucks. They also have a satellite office in El Paso and one planed for Lubbock early next year. Jim says the two items that make him proudest of Shred-it is the focus on security and the 12 employees with whom he works. Not only do they hold a $5 million bond, but “they’re the best customer service oriented group out there,” he said.

I was just glad to find Shred-it. With the growth of ID theft, I might have considered burying my old files on a deserted island.

For more information or to schedule your shredding, call 505.344.0080 or 1.800.69.SHRED. The web site is www.shredit.com.

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