Shredding confidential documents? Don’t buy a paper shredder until you read this.

Before you run out to your local office supplies store and buy a paper shredder, you may want to consider the advantages of using a secure, confidential shredding bag for your private documents. The benefits of a shredding bag will help you save time and money and best of all, you’ll also ensure that your documents are shredded using the most secure methods available while AND helping the environment.

1. Confidential Shredding Bags are Simply More Secure

With a stack of confidential but outdated documents to dispose of, you probably already know that just throwing your confidential and private documents into your council-provided recycling bin is a not a good idea. Your first impulse may then be to go out and buy a shredding machine at your local office store. Don’t.

The type of shredder you’ll probably end up buying is NOT recommended for secure document destruction. Most of these machines use a fairly basic kind of paper shredding known as ‘strip cut shredding’—the paper is cut into thin strips that can actually be reconstructed by identity thieves. What you really need to secure your privacy is an industrial-quality paper shredding machine that uses a ‘crosscut’ shredding method that is impossible to reconstruct and destroys documents securely.

2. Secure Shredding Bags Reduce Clutter

Reducing the sheer amount of ‘stuff’ and clutter in your home or office is fashionable right now as more and more people are discovering the joys of living (and working) clutter-free. The paper shredding machines you can buy at your local office supply store are big ugly bulky boxes that will sit in your kitchen, spare room, or home office unused for most of the time. A total waste of space! Because you’re only going to need a paper shredder a few times a year there’s no need to have a machine that sits in the corner gathering dust 99.9% of the time. In comparison, a document shredding bag is something you fill up and pop into Australia Post and it’s gone.

3: Sustainable, Renewable and Environmentally Safe

We believe that it’s critical to recycle 100% of all shredded paper. It’s simply the right thing to do! By choosing to use a confidential shredding bag, you are directly contributing to making the world a better place. Your shredded documents are turned in to recycled paper products such as kitty litter, cardboard boxes, toilet paper, hand towels, and more.

You’ll feel good knowing that you’re closing the loop by recycling and reusing valuable resources.

4: Get Back Your Precious Time

Did you know that most paper shredding machines only have the capacity to shred about 6 to 12 sheets of paper at a time. And you’ll have to manually take out fiddly staples and paper clips as you go which can become quite tedious quite quickly. If you have a stack of paper to destroy this may take up your weekend. Compare this to a secure shredding bag: just fill it and drop it into Australia Post! You can fit up to 5 kgs of documents per bag, that’s about 1,000 sheets of A4 paper—including staples and paperclips.

5: Depreciating Asset vs. Business Expense

You probably already know that as a general rule, it's better to expense a cost than to depreciate an asset it because money has a time value. This means that it’s better to pay the small expense of a secure shredding bag vs. buying a shredding machine that you will barely use. If you expense the shredding bag, you get the deduction in the current tax year, and you can immediately use the money the expense deduction has freed from taxes. It just makes good business sense to use a secure, confidential shredding bag rather than buying a shredder.

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Need help with shredding your confidential documents? We recommend Bag-N-Shred for an affordable and environmentally friendly way to shred paperwork via Australia Post. It’s affordable (only $19.90 for up to 5 kgs of documents—that’s about 1,000 sheets of A4 paper paper) and you can also request a free Certificate of Destruction.

Read more about Bag-N-Shred here.