Paper Shredders for Libraries

Libraries often use shredders to help dispose of their vast amounts of old paper waste.  For the most part, libraries deal with information that is not private or confidential, and thus many purchase large heavy duty strip cut shredders to handle their papers to be thrown away.  While a crosscut shredder can reduce paper to confetti, a strip cut shredder can usually cut a piece of paper into 15 to 25 strips of paper, which is more than adequate for non-confidential material.

The types of material that libraries shred are archival bibliographies, card catalogs, pages of books, old magazines, research documents, and old and unusable papers and books.  For most of these type of items, though, shredding is not necessary, and a thrift sale combined with a large dumpster may be all that is needed to dispose of the materials.

Libraries do at times deal with private consumer information, and this should be handled like all businesses, by either shredding or incinerating the confidential documents.  Failure to properly dispose of these types of consumer information can open a library up to legal problems like any individual or business.  The small amount of consumer or confidential personal information that a library handles can normally be handled by a small or medium sized home paper shredder.