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San Jose, Calif., Company Shreds Documents, Destroys Other Unwanted Items

Posted on: Thursday, 4 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

Aug. 4--In a nondescript warehouse in North San Jose, an employee of Certified Document Destruction feeds heaps of paper into a shredding machine, deftly plucking out dozens of orange plastic medicine vials by hand and chucking them into a separate bin. This load came from a hospital, and the plastic vials will be shredded separately later.

The company's slogan -- "We Destroy Anything!" -- means it has occasionally shredded casino chips, computer hard drives and plastic toys. But most of its work is reducing tons of paper documents to illegible scraps.

"We want to be able to provide destruction for most anything that is used in an office environment," says Michael Gelinske, the company's general manager.

Certified -- formerly Security Shredding -- was purchased three years ago by family-owned Dalton Enterprises of Anaheim. It has grown from a three-truck operation, Gelinske said, to one with eight trucks, three of them equipped for "mobile shredding."

The public's burgeoning fear of identity theft is spurring growth in the document-shredding industry, Gelinske said. "Our drop-offs went from two or three a week to five or six drop-offs a day" in recent years, he said.

The number of U.S. shredding companies belonging to the National Association of Information Destruction trade group has doubled to 550 over the past three years.

New legislation is driving that growth.

The commercial shredding industry initially got a boost when the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act took effect in April 2003. That law requires health care providers to protect patients' privacy, which many do by regularly shredding old records.

Then, a new rule issued by the Federal Trade Commission last October under the 2003 federal Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act began requiring more businesses than ever to destroy credit reports or information derived from them. The act was intended to prevent identity theft, where crooks hijack someone's personal, credit or bank information and use it to steal cash or make fraudulent purchases.

The FTC's disposal rule went into effect in June and gives businesses until December to come into compliance or face a range of possible penalties. The new rule applies not only to paper records but also to information found on computers and other electronic media, such as CD-ROMs and floppy disks.

Another proposal now in the Senate would require every company to destroy any document containing sensitive personal information, said Robert Johnson, executive director of the Arizona-based information destruction trade group.

Certified's largest customers -- law firms, hospitals and title companies -- may shred 25 to 50 tons of paper a year. Laws requiring health care companies to protect patient information also have increased the demand for shredding services.

Gelinske said Certified sets itself apart from its growing number of competitors by providing quick response time, broad experience -- most employees have worked there more than 10 years -- the guarantee that shredded material gets recycled, and flexible pricing. Certified will charge by the container, the minute, or the pound.

Clients can choose to have a specially equipped shredding truck come to them and destroy their documents on site. Or Certified can pick up the shreddables and destroy them back at the plant. For individuals dropping off a few boxes of old credit-card receipts and canceled checks? That will be $5 a box.

Certified has clients from Hollister and Santa Cruz to San Francisco and Antioch. After each job is finished, customers get a dated certificate of destruction.

The paper leftovers, reduced either to thin paper strips or tiny cross-cut squares by the shredders, are compressed into 1,300-pound bales and shipped off to a Georgia Pacific paper mill in Oregon. There they are reborn as new paper products.

"When the dot-com bust occurred here it was a shredding boom," Gelinske said. Downsizing or folding companies "had a lot of files they had to shred to close their doors."

Certified also has just begun offering document storage services -- at another facility, to ensure the materials don't accidentally take a trip through the shredder.

By Sue McAllister and Michele Chandler

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Copyright (c) 2005, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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