15 Facts About Paper Shredding

1. The first paper shredding machine was patented by inventor Abbot Augustus Lowe in 1909. But his prototype never saw mass production — Lowe died only 3 years after patenting it.
2. In 1935, a German engineer named Adolf Ehinger designed a second machine created for paper shredding. He had to create it in a hurry: Its purpose was to shred a huge selection of volumes of anti-Nazi propaganda before Hitler’s secret police might find them.
3. Paper shredding is not only a thing that occur in a cubicle. Many firms’ dependence on document destruction is really great that they can hire dedicated shredding companies to visit their offices with huge ten-wheel trucks with giant paper shredding machines placed on the rear.
4. Doctors and health insurance providers are legally tasked with document shredding duties. Because their patients’ and clients’ information can be so sensitive, state and federal laws dictate that medical organizations have comprehensive data-destruction plans.
5. The practice of paper shredding gained a questionable reputation in 1972, when President Nixon’s operatives shredded huge amounts of paperwork to try to conceal the bungled attempt to burglarize the Democratic National Committee headquarters with the Watergate Hotel.
6. The biggest paper shredding machines on the market help make your office shredder look like a plaything in comparison. Many of them eat anything, including (but not likely tied to) binder clips, rubber bands and hanging file folders. Do not anger the appliance.
7. Because of state and federal laws geared towards preventing id theft, paper shredding is growing into its own industry. Many waste management companies have introduced document destruction to their service menus.
8. Shredding services in your home saw a marked increase in popularity in 1988 — 4 seasons the United States Supreme Court ruled that personal trash became public property once it hit the curb.
9. Many document destruction services provide a “Certificate of Destruction” — a legal document that means that certain practices were followed in the destruction of documents, and that every of the documents were completely destroyed.
10. Paper shredding used to be all any company had to bother about. But as digitally-stored information became more predominant, the dependence on specialized services to erase and destroy computer computer drives followed suit.
11. Like doctors and medical insurance professionals, accountants are legally bound to adhere to certain document shredding standard. The Gramm-Leach Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1993 outlined the measures that must definitely be taken up destroy sensitive client information.
12. Iranian revolutionaries changed the way we approach paper shredding in 1979, when many of them stormed the American embassy and seized piles of shredded documents. Since the embassy’s shredders only cut paper into long, thin strips, it turned out straightforward for the revolutionaries to paste the documents back together again to gain access to the (highly secret) information they held. After this, cross-cut shredders became the norm.
13. According to a survey through the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center and Fellowes, Inc., many Americans believe identity theft is a bit more likely to occur during online exchanges — despite the fact that online exchanges represent lower than 10 % of identity fraud cases.
14. Some of the most technologically advanced shredding machines cut documents into pieces measuring just 3mm by 9mm.
15. The National Association for Information Destruction could be the shredding industry’s nationally recognized trade association. It is headquartered in Phoenix, AZ.