Today, the world produces more waste than ever, making recycling and reusing an integral part of our lives. This is where free document shredding comes in as a great way of promoting an environment-friendly movement. Free document shredding is conducted by community services that work towards reducing the carbon footprint of homes and offices in the town. Not just promoting a green movement, free document shredding also helps in safely discarding of bills and documents that confidential.

Community services usually offer free document shredding during most times of the year. Usually, if the weight of the documents is in large volumes, these services send across staff members who visit your home or office and collect the documents. However, some free document shredding services may set up centers in various locations such as a shopping center parking lots, Service halls, etc. The documents may be shredded in a mobile shredding vehicle or carried to a warehouse in secure containers before being shredded.

Before carrying out free document shredding, service providers lay down a few general rules that should be followed. Thus, understanding how you can prepare the documents before going ahead with shredding will save your time as well as that of the service provider:

Sort out – It is essential to understand that once a document is shredded, it cannot be put back together. Thus, it is absolutely important to understand which documents need to be saved and which have passed their retention dates. You do not want to be worrying about documents that were important and have turned to paper shreds, right?

Pull out anything other than paper – Many documents are bound by metal binders or hard supporting materials that cannot be shredded. Anything that is not paper supply has to be eliminated from the pile. Leaving paper binders will not only waste your time but can also disrupt the working of the document shredder. Also, it can be harmful to the person who is handling the shredding machine.

Other kinds of document shredding – While paper materials are most commonly shredded, today, free document shredding services also offer to shred documents held in the form of flash drives, tapes, CD’s, etc. Nevertheless, these kinds of materials have to be separated from documents in the form of paper as the mechanism through which they are shredded is different.

A little sorting and preparing documents will help in smooth document shredding.