With the introduction of GDPR, confidential waste destruction has become a fact of office life for many companies. And with online traders selling shredding machines for less than £100 you may wonder why it makes sense to use a secure shredding company for the destruction of your paper-based records.
So what are the advantages?
Enhanced Security At All Stages
It can be a costly mistake to assume your data is safe while it remains on your premises – an estimated 85% of data breaches happen within the workplace, and these can result in hefty fines and even imprisonment.
While company document management policies and training are useful, they are only effective if combined with physical obstacles to theft by opportunistic, unscrupulous or disgruntled employees or visitors, and documents left unlocked and unguarded while they wait to be shredded are a prime target for a data breach.
Inexpensive office shredders are notoriously slow and unreliable, are unable to cope with large quantities of documents and need staples and bindings to be removed before shredding. This can easily lead to a backlog at the shredder and unprotected documents.
Secure destruction services such as
Securall® from Avena Group provide secure storage consoles for your discarded confidential waste. Once the documents are placed in the console, no one except authorised keyholders can retrieve them.
When Avena empties the console by a
BS7858 security-vetted customer service representative, the contents either undergo immediate secure destruction at your premises or are returned to the shredding depot under secure CCTV-monitored and satellite-tracked transport.
Compliance And Peace Of Mind
Companies that store, handle and use personal data have a legal obligation to comply with GDPR. While you may be confident that all your confidential waste destruction meets the requirements, how will you be able to prove it in the event of an audit?
Confidential waste management and destruction companies are registered contractors authorised to issue certificates of destruction for every consignment of documents they handle. These certificates enable you to maintain accurate records that can be used as an audit trail and evidence of compliance.
Recycling And Carbon Footprint
On average, 80% of waste paper in the UK is recycled, but packing shredded paper into plastic bags and putting them into a ‘mixed recyclables’ bin for collection adds considerably to the recycling process as the waste must be sorted for separate recycling.
Without plastics, cardboard and other waste to contend with, confidential waste contractors produce a high-quality byproduct with a recycling rate of 98-100%.
Avena Group’s SECURALL system is also designed to reduce carbon footprint. Rather than paying regular visits to empty half-filled consoles, Avena is notified when the console is full. At the Avena shredding facility the shredded paper is compacted into bales and collected in bulk by trucks that take the paper directly to the recycling plant.
Productivity And Cost Savings
We have already referred to the notorious slowness and unreliability of office shredders, but the true cost of this to a business may be hidden. An audit of how much time is spent removing staples and bindings from documents, feeding them through the shredder in small amounts, unjamming the shredder and waiting for the overload switch to disengage could be quite revealing.
Confidential waste destruction services are equipped to make the process time-efficient, leaving your employees free to focus productively on their key roles.
If you would like to know more about Securall secure document destruction, call Avena Group on
0845 5219 892 for a no-obligation discussion of your requirements, or fill in our
online contact form and a member of our support team will contact you within 24 hours.
