Can You Put Shredded Paper In Recycling?
After shredding your confidential documents, you empty them into your general recycling bin, knowing that you are doing your bit towards being a more sustainable and environmentally friendly business. Soon those strips of paper will be turned to pulp and find a new life as fresh paper.
Or will they? The startling fact is that most general recycling centres are ill-equipped to process shredded paper, and some even refuse to accept it. As a result, most of the shredded paper that is added to general recycling streams will end up as landfill.
Why General Recyclers Don’t Like Shredded Paper
During the recycling process, large screens are used to sort waste into different categories, but smaller particles such as shredded paper can fall through these screens along with other particles that are deemed to be too small to recycle. This rejected waste is then sent to the landfill.
Another problem is that these small, lightweight particles can find their way into the mechanisms of recycling machinery and cause jams that lead to stoppages and damaged parts. For this reason, many recycling centres will either turn away shredded paper or send it directly to a landfill site.
Those centres that do accept shredded paper will generally only do so if it has been separately bagged and can be picked off the processing conveyor belts.
How To Recycle Shredded Paper
The only way you can be 100% sure that your confidential documents, once securely shredded, are converted into recycled paper is to use a specialist recycling service. Avena is not a general recycling service and is structured to receive and process specific types of recyclable waste, including paper.
By combining GDPR-compliant, industrial-scale shredding with efficient paper recycling, Avena eliminates two problems in one for its clients: how to securely dispose of confidential documents, and how to do so in a sustainable manner.
The entire destruction and recycling process is designed to be energy- and cost-efficient. Confidential waste is stored in secure consoles on your premises until collected by Avena and taken directly to its shredding facility. Here it is cross-shredded into small particles that prevent any possible reconstruction of documents and then compressed into large bales that are sent to UK paper mills for reprocessing into paper products. As this paper waste is completely segregated from the start, there is no chance of it leaving the recycling stream or being contaminated, so the recovery rate for paper fibres is close to 100%.
How To Make Avena Your Trusted Paper Recycling Partner
We have simplified the process to make it easy for you to switch to using Avena for secure and sustainable document destruction and recycling.
Depending on the scale and structure of your business and how frequently you require document disposal, we can tailor a service precisely to your needs. We can service your offices through a regular contract or ad hoc collections and offer document shredding either on your premises or at our secure processing facility. We also issue a certificate of destruction for every consignment of waste we collect, so you can keep accurate records to support your GDPR and environmental auditing requirements.
Peace of mind is just a phone call away – contact Avena today for a free evaluation of your paper recycling needs!
Interesting in learning more about our services? Speak to one of our experts today.
Looking for a quick quote for secure destruction & recycling? Get a quote today.
