As you walk through a typical office setup, you will notice a number of gadgets and devices that are installed for some purpose or the other. There will be a Xerox machine, a printer, a coffee machine and quite inevitably, a paper shredder. Now if you go on to check the density of office population around these devices, you will notice, that after the coffee machine, it is the paper shredder that hosts a crowd. Now, it is not that the shredders are offering something more delectable than coffee in mid-day, that the office seems to be engaged in some kind of ritualistic circling around it, the point lies in the relief that this simple device offer to those who have to get rid of something important and real fast, and of course, beyond recognition. It is not that you don’t have other methods of disposal; Shredding of confidential documents is always better than things like hiding, burning, or chewing the paper for lunch.

The idea of data destruction is not new. It is on since the earliest days of human history and from the earliest childhood of any human on earth. Remember the days when we accidentally dropped the letter of the principal addressed to parents in the open manhole . . . or, every time we managed to smear ink into the report card where the science and arithmetic grades showed? Data destruction is embedded in our genes, however, it gets more sophisticated with age, when we have all the environment and allergies to think of. As we grow, we accumulate more and more confidential data in our lives. Be it professional or private, we have plenty of things to hide, and what better way to do it than shredding it to unrecognizable bits. Now no one has the time to play jigsaw puzzle with your shredded documents, thus, once through the shredder, there is no way the data can be recovered (unless of course, you blurt it out).

You may try and defend the traditional methods like hiding, burning and chewing as more potent solutions. However, there are considerable risks associated with it. To begin with, hiding is a silly solution. Some point or the other, someone with more brains than you will seek it out. It matters come to worst, you yourself will forget where the document is located, and employ external help to relocate the same. Talking about burning, in very simple words, the environmentalists will surely get you. If it is paper and you are burning it instead of recycling it, you are claiming the life of another rainforest tree and it is purely criminal. If you don’t have space available to plant ten evergreen trees, and look after them till they reach maturity, don’t burn paper. Other risks of burning can include setting your home or office on fire. Lastly, the reason why devouring confidential documents is not so good an idea is that the ink may cause allergies or, digestive problems. Shredding of confidential documents is therefore a reasonable solution.