Last month we wrote a delightful blog post about the evolution of the shredder. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead, we’ll wait here. Got it? Good. We started at the invention of the very first shredder and wound our way to the present day paper eating machines and all the variations that have come along since. But of course, some of those shredding models would be completely impractical to have in your home or office or have been designed specifically with commercial use in mind. That brings us quite nicely onto our next subject and something we know quite a bit about. The birth and evolution of shredding as a service.
The Birth Of Shredding As A Service
Shredding as a service may not have been around since the beginning, but it’s been around for much longer than you would think. The first shredding service emerged onto the scene in 1988, specialising in destroying paper documents for businesses in small quantities. They found themselves in high demand, as businesses didn’t want to spend hours bent over a shredder that could only take 5 pages at a time and push them out again at 2.5 metres per minute (that’s your standard £15-£20 office shredder). It’s hard work and it’s really inefficient – time is money after all. So instead one enterprising man decided to buy himself a big shredding machine and a warehouse and started destroying people’s documents for a small fee.
Since that moment shredding as a service exploded. Shredding warehouses sprung up like weeds and the demand kept coming for more. Not long after the shredding as a service system was first adopted, shredding companies started looking for ways to stand out from the crowd. Mobile shredding services were tested and eventually rolled out with their own unique equipment, and mobile shredding trucks started offering on-site shredding solutions. This meant businesses didn’t need to deliver their bags of paper to a warehouse to be destroyed; they could just bag it up and wait for the truck to visit. Automated retail kiosks were trailed to give the public access to industrial shredding capability, but while these were fairly popular in the US they didn’t take off in the UK.
Moving Into The Modern Age
Of course, in recent years there has been a big push towards the ‘paperless office’, attempting to get businesses to cut down on the paper they are generating or taking in, therefore reducing the environmental impact. We’re also seeing a generation of millennial emerging into the world, 34% of whom see data theft as a ‘victimless crime’, making high quality, easy to use shredding services all the more essential. But it’s not just paper that contains sensitive information that needs to be destroyed. Now we are seeing more and more professional shredding services incorporating digital or other methods of data destruction. Many are investing in new shredding machines that can tackle USB sticks, hard drives and even entire computers. With waves of cyber crime and high profile data thefts on the news every few weeks, media destruction is becoming a big part of the modern shredding service.
Today, 6 or 7 out of 10 medium to large sized business will use shredding as a service to keep up with their data destruction needs and we expect that number to increase over the next few years. Shredding within the office environment is often regarded as the job reserved when you’ve run out of other things to do, or a job reserved for the work experience kid. It’s time consuming, no one really wants to do it and why spend hours feeding a shredder when a professional service could have your entire pile destroyed in minutes. At Hungry Shredder we have a range of shredding services to suit your needs, all designed with security and simplicity in mind. To find out more, get in touch today and feed the hungry shredder.