These days, you can never be too careful when it comes to protecting your identity. Between countless numbers of scams and repeated incidents of identity theft, everyday citizens and companies have to do all they can to protect themselves. In 2017 alone, there were more than 16 million victims of identity fraud.

One of the ways individuals and companies can protect themselves is with proper document shredding. For companies, the use of commercial paper shredders can help keep them safe. Top executives from 300 companies have indicated that the security of company records as one of the most critical issues facing business.

Here are six benefits of secure paper shredding:

• Peace of mind: The use of home paper shredders and commercial paper shredders in office helps put citizens, businesses and customers at ease knowing that important and confidential information has been destroyed in a proper manner.
• Getting help: Having paper shredders at home and commercial paper shredders in the office is nice, but one option you have with document destruction is having someone else do it for you. If you don’t have a need for a paper shredder in your home or office, document destruction companies can take care of the shredding process for you and even come to your home or office with all the necessary equipment.
• Helping the environment: Document destruction and paper shredding not only keeps citizens and companies safe, it’s also eco-friendly. By shredding and recycling discarded documents, landfills don’t fill up as quickly. Even as the world is becoming increasingly paperless, paper is still used in a lot of industries. By taking time to shred and recycle documents, you’re doing the environment a big favor because you’re protecting new trees from being turned into paper products.
• Following the law: For businesses, the use of commercial paper shredders helps keep them compliant on both the state and national levels when it comes to destroying and handling the personal information of their customers.
• Trust: By using a shredder for personal use or by using a shredding company, the trust between a business and its customers remains strong. Customers trust the business knowing that it is going to keep their identity safe and destroy any information it doesn’t need so that people with bad intent don’t get ahold of it.
• Clean disposal: Whether you’ve got a home office or a desk in an office, there’s a good chance you’ve got a whole mess of paperwork. Maybe it’s scattered on your desk. Maybe you’ve got a bunch of old documents stashed away in filing cabinets. Fortunately, paper shredding offers folks a clean and safe way to dispose of all those documents (provided they aren’t needed anymore). If you’re a busy working man or woman, odds are you don’t like a lot of clutter in your schedule or on your desk. Commercial paper shredders can help you eliminate that clutter.

Simply put, by using high capacity shredders, industrial shredders or shredding services, you can have peace of mind knowing that you’re getting rid of important information in a safe manner. Not only that, but you’re also helping the environment and if you’re a business, you’re protecting your customers and deepening the trust they have in your company.