Businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, hospitals, and individuals often have sensitive or confidential papers and other items that need to be shredded to help maintain privacy and confidentiality. These may include obsolete client files, tax documents, personal records, medical records, cancelled checks, data disks, private business files, and any other paperwork or items that need to remain confidential or include personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, bank information, financial information, and similar items.
However, depending on the size of your company and amount of materials that need to be shredded, document destruction can be a full-time job.
Fortunately, Marin County shredding companies can offer shredding services, document destruction, data disk shredding, and other services. The list below shares the most common requests for shredding services in Marin County, including areas such as Fairfax, Tiburon, San Rafael, San Anselmo, Novato, Mill Valley and Larkspur and beyond. Once you have an idea of which shredding services you need, talk with your local shredding companies and find out what services they provide.
Paper Shredding Services
Paper shredding services, including bulk paper shredding and office document shredding, medical record shredding, personal record shredding, legal document shredding, invoice and payroll document shredding, cancelled check shredding, tax record shredding, and shredding for other paper, are some of the most common services offered by local shredding services. These are often provided onsite and in a secure manner to protect your confidentiality and security.
Document Destruction Services in Marin County
Document destruction, including paper shredding, envelope shredding, file folder shredding, notebook shredding, and other types of destruction of written and printed documents, can help protect businesses, patients, employees and individuals by completely destroying records and personal information.
Secure Document Shredding
While some bulk shredding is only required to dispose of unneeded paper and records, some clients require confidential shredding or secure document destruction. This is often done in the case of sensitive information, such as personal records, sensitive personal information (such as names, social security numbers, and addresses), financial records, and other items that need to remain confidential for the protection of businesses and individuals. Most confidential shredding takes place onsite and by a licensed, bonded professional shredding service that promises confidential shredding and secure document disposal or recycling. If you need confidential shredding services, talk with Marin County shredding companies near you about what you can expect in terms of confidentiality from their company.
Onsite Shredding Services
Mobile shredding services and onsite shredding companies come to you to shred your unneeded documents and data. These services often offer regular appointments or on-call appointments. They come to businesses, civil buildings, hospitals, and even private homes, and destroy documents on site. Some will offer to shred papers while you watch, and others weigh the documents before and after shredding so you can be confident the work was done correctly. Many of these services also offer recycling and other features to deal with shredded papers.
Data Destruction
Paper isn’t the only medium that needs shredding. Data destruction takes care of stored data, including that on tapes (both audio and video), hard drives, hard disks, floppy disks, magnetic storage tapes, optical media, thumb drives/USB drives, disks including DVDs, and more. Simply deleting data from storage media often only makes it inaccessible, but it rarely makes such data irretrievable. There are many data destruction services in Marin County, including those in Novato, Mill Valley, San Rafael, San Anselmo, Larkspur and Corte Madera and other areas.
Hard Drive Destruction in Marin County
Hard drives with sensitive, confidential, and personal information or information pertaining to a company or individuals, should be destroyed using data destruction methods such as overwriting and physical destruction. Hard drive destruction can be performed onsite by mobile hard drive destruction companies, and many will offer to let you watch the process and issue you a certificate of destruction. Some companies may also offer electronic waste recycling for destroyed hard drives.
Floppy Disk, CD, DVD, and USB Shredding Services
As with hard drives, information stored on disks of any kind must be completely destroyed or professionally overwriiten in order to render the information on them irretrievable an prevent it from being compromised. Floppy disk shredding, DVD and CD shredding, USB drive destruction and other services can provide you with peace of mind. These disk shredding services will often offer a certificate or allow you to be present during the destruction. Electronic waste recycling is also a possibility from some companies.
Transparency Shredding and Destruction
Transparencies and other plastic or laminated materials, including laminated file folders, plastic binders, overhead transparencies, X-rays, and more, should never be shredded in home or basic shredders. For transparency shredding, you’ll need to rely on a professional shredding service. They will have the equipment and capability to do the job correctly.
Marin County Offsite Records Shredding
Offsite record shredding, also known as haul-away shredding, is a service in which a business or individual collects items for shredding, places them in a specific container, and then calls the shredding company to pick up the records or documents to be shredded at the shredding service’s location. While this can be a convenient method of disposing of printed information, customers should take care not to send confidential or personal information off-site for offsite records shredding. This is because confidential information can be compromised when taken offsite, and the client often has no way of guaranteeing that the private information isn’t compromised or is shredded and disposed of as promised.
Shredded Paper Recycling
Shredded paper disposal, most often in the form of recycling, is the final step in the shredding process. Most Marin County shredding services offer shredded paper recycling. Since shredded paper isn’t usually welcomed by waste management companies due to the tiny pieces being inconvenient to process into paper and therefore having less value to recyclers, shredded paper has to be recycled in specific ways. This can include composting, use as animal bedding, package and shipping materials, and use as stuffing or filling. Talk with your shredding company about how they process or recycle the paper they shred.
Favorite Document Shredder Brands in Marin County and the Bay Area
Large paper shredding companies often use proprietary paper shredders or industrial-sized paper shredding equipment, but many shredder manufacturers create products for a variety of uses and users. The following brands are some favored by professional shredding companies, businesses, and home offices in San Rafael, Novato, Mill Valley, San Anselmo, Larkspur, Corte Madera, Tiburon, Sausalito, Fairfax, Ross and Belvedere and other local areas.
- Fellowes
- Swingline
- Aurora
- Black & Decker
- Ativa
- Royal
- Ameri-Shred
- Staples
- HSM
- GoEcoLife
- Highmark
- Ideal
- Securio
- Office Depot
- Highmark
- Aurora
- Destroyit
- GMB
- Sentinel
- Skilcraft
- Pure 420
- MBM
- Kobra
- Intimus
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