The Difference between Off-Site Shredding and On-Site Mobile Shredding

Is document shredding a top priority in your company? Routine destruction of confidential documents protects your customers and employees from identity theft and ensures your company’s compliance with state and federal privacy laws. Unfortunately, not all shredding providers are equal. In this blog, we explain the differences between off-site shredding and on-site mobile shredding.

The Risks Off-Site Shredding

When you choose an off-site shredding service, your shredding provider collects your unwanted documents and hauls them away. An out-of-sight, out-of-mind solution may offer quick relief—but it could come back to haunt you. That’s because the moment your documents leave your possession, the chain of custody is broken. If your shredding provider forgets to lock the cargo door of the truck, documents could spill out onto the highway, exposing personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) to the public.

Even if it reaches the shredding plant safely, several people may handle and view your information. Not only that, but you have no way of knowing whether your off-site shredding provider is actually destroying your information. To save money, disreputable companies may skip the shredding process altogether and sell your whole documents to a recycling company instead. Although many off-site shredding providers adhere to privacy protection standards as much as possible, off-site shredding by its nature exposes your information to a range of risks.

The Benefits of On-Site Shredding

Unlike off-site shredding, mobile on-site shredding offers a verifiable chain of custody. When you use an on-site shredding service, a secure, mobile shredding truck comes to your place of business. A security-screened shredding representative collects your documents, deposits them directly into a shredding collection bin, and loads that bin into the shredding machine.

Since mobile shredding trucks allow destruction of your documents on-site at your business, you can watch the entire process from your office window or on a video monitor mounted on the mobile shredding truck. At the end of your shredding project, your on-site shredding provider gives you a Certificate of Destruction.

How you destroy your confidential information is up to you. When outsourcing your next document destruction project, consider the advantages of mobile, on-site shredding.

For more paper shredding and document destruction information, please call us at (610) 692-TEAR (8327) or complete the form on this page.

Wiggins Shredding serves Pennsylvania and the Tri-State Area of Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey with secure shredding and destruction services. We are your trusted, locally-owned paper shredding resource!