As a business owner, you’re probably already aware of the benefits shredding important documents by saving you time, money, reputation, and devastation. If you want to keep important documents like bank statements or credit card applications safe, document shredding is the best practice to ensure each document is completely destroyed and rendered unreadable. Shredding paper not only protects sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands, it’s also good for the environment.

Whether you’re shredding the documents yourself or sending them off to a professional document shredding company, you are effortlessly reducing your harmful footprint on the environment.

Your business and household has more documents than needed and even documents that need to be protected from the public. When these documents are shredded, you are both protecting yourself from identity theft and allowing the reuse of paper through recycling and compose production.

Here are ways that the practice of document shredding is beneficial to the environment.

Reduction of Destroying Forests

There are many forests each year that are torn down and destroyed because of the need of the resources they provide, especially paper. Trees hold importance to our environment by supplying oxygen, bark, shade, and helping our quality of air improve. Humans are creating congested air and damage to our ozone layer by cutting down virgin forests that would have otherwise benefited our earth for years to come. With the paper being reused, the need to cut down forests substantially decrease.

Shredding paper can help this problem by allowing the paper that we use to be recycled into more paper or other useful items such as Styrofoam. Styrofoam production is naturally harmful to the earth, except when produced from shredded documents and other paper. Document shredding companies naturally recycle the pounds and pounds of paper they shred.

Compost Potential

Shredded paper serves as the perfect item to be composted. Simply throwing your papers away, they’ll end up in a landfill that harms the ecosystem and has the chance of landing in the ocean, killing endangered animals and adding filth to beaches. Instead, you can dispose of the paper in an environmentally friendly method. When composted, your old documents will be transformed into a rich, organic mixture that’s great for soil and plants. This way, your sensitive information will be protected and serving the environment all at once.

Economically Helping the Environment

The costs to produce paper and other related materials are expensive. There’s labor costs, fuel costs, transport costs, machine costs, chemical costs and more. By shredding and recycling documents, you are reducing the damage paper production causes and cutting down on its costs.

The fuel and chemicals used for cutting down trees, transporting them, and transforming them into paper are also damaging to the quality of air we breathe when released.

Some paper shredding companies will inform you on specifically how you’ve benefited the environment by giving an estimate on how many trees have been saved from your efforts. You can feel good knowing your sensitive information is safe while the ecosystem is too.

To receive all the environmental and economic benefits mentioned above, practices of document shredding should be active throughout your home and workplace. Those old bills collecting dust can be stolen by a criminal. Prevent this today by carefully shredding documents to help the environment. You really can do it all!