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How to Dispose of Confidential Documents

Dispose of Documents
Published: February 17, 2020

Any office or business is likely to have some confidential documents which require safe destruction and disposal. By confidential documents, we mean those which contain sensitive details which must not fall into the wrong hands. Examples would be credit card details, other financial information, medical records, and trade secrets.

It is important to distinguish between the level of security required for the disposal of confidential documents. This generally varies based on how disastrous it would be for someone outside your business to happen upon this information. Some types of confidential documents do not require high security disposal. For example, you may not wish for your internal plans to fall into the hands of your competitors, but shredding the print-outs and placing them in a regular recycling collection is generally an adequate level of security. For some less sensitive information, it may even be sufficient to tear up rather than shred the papers, if you do not own a shredder. At Solo Resource Recovery, we can provide regular mixed recycling or dedicated cardboard and paper recycling. We recommend the latter if your business produces a large volume of paper waste.

For credit card information and medical details, extra precautions are needed. At Solo Resource Recovery, we provide a document destruction service which provides the discretion that you require. We can provide your workplace with a lockable document bin. The contents of this bin are not accessible to your employees, as it is specifically designed to keep prying eyes out. When you need to dispose of a confidential document, you simply feed it into the lockable bin. We understand that it can be difficult to predict the regularity with which this bin will require collection, and that this is likely to vary at different times of year. Resultantly, it is best if you keep the bin on your premises until you notify us that it is full. At this point, a representative of Solo Resource Recovery will come to your site to collect the bin. At the same time, they will deliver a new, empty document destruction bin. This ensures that there is no gap in service and you can continue to throw our confidential documents immediately. We will take the full bin to our secure disposal facility and shred and recycle the contents onsite. As we understand that the documents contained within the bin are of a sensitive nature, we ensure security is maintained at all steps in the process.

A common misconception is that if you tear up confidential papers and put the pieces into different bins, this increases security. While there may be some marginal benefits of doing this, if the two smaller bins are emptied into one larger bin on your site, this may not be sufficient. For truly sensitive documents, including medical records, make sure your obligations are met by investing in truly secure disposal with our document destruction service.

To find out more about the disposal of confidential documents and how we at Solo Resource Recovery can assist you, simply get in touch with our competent and friendly team. We can be reached by phone on 1300 46 76 56 or via the contact form on our website. We look forward to providing you with further information on document destruction and the many other waste management and disposal services that we can provide to you.

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