Marin County – Shredding

While most shredding companies will give guarantees for things such as time spent on the job, estimate vs. actual costs and employee security training, they are unable to offer a guarantee that everything you give to them is shredded. Shredding companies are unable to take a complete inventory of the documents you provide to be shredded; therefore there is no way they are able to, in good conscience, say that everything will be destroyed.

This is where a certificate of destruction comes in. While less legally-binding than an actual guarantee, a certificate of destruction provides some peace of mind that the bulk of the material you send to be shredded is being destroyed. Often written in terms of the number of boxes shred, a certificate of destruction will be given to you once your shredding job is completed. If you receive an invoice before the certificate of destruction, you should ask to see the certificate before making any payments.

Diamond Certified shredding companies in Marin County are backed by the Diamond Certified Performance Guarantee. If the shredding company is Diamond Certified and you can’t figure out the issue by talking with the owner, contact the mediation department at [email protected] or call 800-738-1138.

Simple Ways to Stop Conflict with Marin County Shredding Companies
If the shredding company you chose is not Diamond Certified, you may need some help resolving conflicts you may encounter with their service. Remember to take the necessary steps to ensure privacy and security before choosing a shredding company to hire.

However, conflicts may arise even if you do take all the right measures to avoid them. The following tips can be helpful in ending conflict with shredding companies, including those in the cities of San Rafael, Mill Valley, Larkspur, Tiburon and Fairfax.

• Every interaction matter: From the beginning, you need to treat your shredding representative with respect and courtesy. Always be willing to communicate and bring up concerns as they arise, so nothing is able to grow into a larger problem.
• Stay completely in the moment: When addressing concerns with your shredding company, set aside time without interruption. This will communicate the seriousness of the matter and also make you more aware of the possibilities for ending conflict.
• Be willing to compromise: People who are arguing tend to zero in on all their differences when what they should be looking at is what they have in common. Ask questions and allow yourself to see all the areas in which you are satisfied with your shredding company’s services. This can lead to finding a solution for the areas in which you experience dissatisfaction.
• Listen twice as much as you talk: Explain your complaint and then be quiet. Really allow the shredding professional to explain their side of the story and be willing to concede if they make a valid argument.
• If all else fails, ask for a supervisor: If you are employing the techniques above and getting nowhere with a middle manager, ask to speak to their boss or the owner of the company. This does not make you difficult; you are simply communicating the seriousness of your complaint.

If you are still unable to resolve the conflict with your Marin County shredding, you are always welcome to file a complaint with your local Better Business Bureau. If you hired a company who has is certified by the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), you should also contact NAID with any complaints.

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

Do you know the difference between a strip-cut and cross-cut shred is? Not many people understand the world of shredding and the indelibly linked world of identity theft. That’s why you’ll want to be more informed before you hire a company to dispose of your personal documents.

The following list of terms and definitions should help you navigate through a better professional relationship with your shredding company.

archive service
The point at which an individual’s records have reached the end of their retention period and need to be destroyed.

Also known as: paper archiving limit, archive limit

auto feed shredding
The process of shredding huge amounts of paper automatically.

Also known as: stack and shred, automatic paper shredding, automatic document destruction

check washing
Criminal technique which uses acetone to erase and increase the total amount on a personal check.

console
A locked box some shredding companies provide to collect paper prior to a scheduled shredding job.

consumer sentinel database
Database utilized by the police to access online information in the pursuit of telemarketing and other types of selling fraud.

continuous use
The ability of some paper shredders and document destruction equipment to work for long periods of time without over-heating due to a self-cooling system.

cross cut shredders
Shredders which use two inversely rotating shafts to cut rectangle, parallelogram or diamond-shaped shreds.

Also known as: confetti shredders, cross cut paper shredders

disintegrator
A type of shredding which cuts papers so finely that they are able to get through mesh.

Also known as: disintegration paper shredding

identity fraud
When a criminal uses fictitious personal data to mask their own identity. Paper shredding and document destruction is often used to prevent identity fraud.

identity theft
When a criminal uses the personal information of another individual to mask their own identity. Document destruction and paper shredding services can help prevent identity theft by destroying sensitive documents.

micro cut shredders
A shredder which cuts documents into tiny square or circular pieces.

Also known as: particle cut shredders

security levels
The size at which a strip can be cut for certain security levels (Level 1 cuts at 12 mm/strip, level five (top secret or classified) cuts at 0.8 x 12 mm particles.

skimming
Criminal tactic used to gain access to passwords and other personal information by running a card through a reader, known as a “skimmer”.

strip cut shredders
Standard for paper production were coming a fast end.  The standard shredder type uses rotating knives to cut narrow strips as long as the original sheet of paper.

Also known as: ribbon cut shredders

truncated credit card number
Information protection measure in which all digits in a credit card number, except for the last four, appear as x’s.

Q: Why choose a Diamond Certified shredding company?
A: Diamond Certified helps you choose a shredding company with confidence by offering a list of top-rated local companies who have passed the country’s most in-depth rating process. Only shredding businesses rated Highest in Quality earn the prestigious Diamond Certified award. Most companies can’t pass the ratings. American Ratings Corporation also monitors every Diamond Certified company with ongoing research and ratings. And your purchase is backed by the Diamond Certified Performance Guarantee. So you’ll feel confident choosing a Diamond Certified shredding business.

Q: Is professional shredding expensive?
A: Document destruction, paper shredding and personal document shredding is more affordable than people think. Shop around, ask for quotes on the amount of documents you have to be shred and make your final decision based on this and a variety of other factors including how secure the company seems, whether or not they are certified by NAID, etc.).

 Q: What documents should I shred?
A: There are many documents that need to be shred for your personal identity safety. These include financial documents (anything that comes from a financial institution with your information on it); any document that includes your social security number, date of birth, license number, full name, address, phone number; anything with an account number on it; junk mail (the bar code contained on it often includes some of your personal information).

Q: Will I need to remove any fasteners (staples, paper clips, etc.) before having my documents professional shred?
A: This will vary from company to company, but most local paper shredding businesses now use highly powerful shredding machines that can handle all fasteners. Ask before you decide which shredding company to hire.

Q: What is shred-size and why does it matter?
A: Shred-size is exactly what it sounds like—the size to which your paper is reduced once run through a shredding machine. Many document destruction companies offer various smaller shred-size for different security purposes. Shred-size matters because it increases your security when you shred smaller and with more rough edges. Make sure to find out the shred-size before hiring a shredding company. The largest shred-size should be no bigger than five eighths of an inch by one and a half inches.

Q: What is a certificate of destruction?
A: Most companies issue a certificate of destruction that states all material they have been given has been destroyed. This is especially important for sensitive document destruction, personal paper shredding and other documents that you want to guarantee were shredded.

Q: Is a certificate of destruction a guarantee?
A: No. Shredding companies cannot take a full inventory of all papers included in a shredding job, therefore they cannot guarantee that every single one will be destroyed.

Q: What are some measures I can take to ensure that documents do get destroyed?
A: Shredding your documents yourself is truly the only way to ensure complete destruction of all personal information. On-site shredding can also help you have peace of mind, since the company comes to your home and/or office and does the shredding in front of you. Many shredding companies and document destruction businesses will shred your documents while you watch so you can feel confident that all documents have been destroyed.

Q: Can shredded documents be recycled?
A: Yes! Ask the shredding companies you are considering whether or not this is a service they provide. Many do, so if it is important to you, make sure you find out beforehand.

Q: Can materials other than paper be shredded?
A: Yes. Many shredding companies offer shredding of x-rays, transparencies, diskettes, magnetic tapes, etc. If you have any such items, ask to see what exactly the shredding machines can handle.