It’s the season of mellow fruitfulness, of raking up leaves from the lawn, cutting back shrubs and roses in the garden and piling it all onto a bonfire. Mix that with the fact that if your kids are anything like mine we have been creating a huge bonfire in the garden ready for Bonfire Night… am I getting warm (excuse the pun)?

So you probably have planned on setting fire to the pile, having a few fireworks and everyone is really excited.

Then your eye falls on all the confidential waste paper in the office waiting to be shredded… why not use that on the bonfire? What a great way to get rid of it all at next to no cost! Simply get the fire going then toss it on and hey presto… a great fire and a saving on shredding costs, right?

Wrong!

If you throw a full archive box of paper onto even a well established (very hot) fire the best you could hope for is that the contents get singed at the edges. Compacted paper like this is very hard to burn mainly because all the air has been excluded from tightly packed boxes. And no air means very limited combustion. So you end up in this case with singed paper that is still confidential and readable but now it’s difficult and messy to handle.

It is surprisingly difficult to burn even a cardboard file of paper or even a full lever arch file. The only sure way is to take the documents out of the folder/file/box, stand close to the bonfire and feed them into the flames a few at a time… a very long and uncomfortable experience.

If you are lucky the papers will get incinerated before the hot air from the fire carries the partly burnt sheets into the sky – perhaps you end up with bits of partly burnt confidential papers all over the garden and those of your neighbours… not great eh?

At SFS Ltd we will collect your confidential waste paper in sacks or your own boxes using our own staff and vehicles and will cross shred them. This cross shredded waste is then sent to the paper mills where it is pulped and turned into tissue so there is no chance that it will ever re-appear in a readable format.

If we can help with your secure destruction give us a call today on 0800 008 7229. We can also destroy CD/DVD’s, computer hard drives, microfilm and computer tape. For more information on what types of Secure Destruction we can do click here.

I hope you have a really great Bonfire Night – handle your fireworks safely but if you want to dispose of your confidential documents leave it to the EXPERTS!