Paper Shredders are used to cut paper into very fine strips or tiny paper chips. Government organizations, businesses, and private individuals use shredders to destroy private, confidential, oe sensitive documents. Privacy experts often recommend that individuals shred bills, credit cards and bank account statements, and other documents that could be used by thieves to commit fraud or identify theft. Paper Shredders are becoming increasingly popular as more and more businesses and individuals are choosing to better protect themselves from identify theft and other crimes. They have changed a lot over the last several years and many companies are coming up with excellent improvements in not just security, but ease of use and safety as well.
Paper Shredders range in size and price from small and inexpensive units meant for a few pages, to large units used by commercial shredding services that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and can shred millions of documents in an hour. The normal small Paper Shredders is an electrically powered device, but there are unpowered devices also such as special scissors with multiple blade pair and shredders which are hand-cranked. These machines are classified according to the size and shape of the shreds they produce. Shredders can range in size from standard scissors and other hand, operated devices all the way up to the truck-sized shredders. The different types of Paper Shredders are as follows:
Strip-cut shredders are the least secure device. It uses rotating knives to cut narrow strips as long as the original sheet of paper. It also creates the highest volume of waste in as much as the Chad has the largest surface area.
- Cross cut shredders use two contra-rotating drums to cut rectangular, parallelogram, or diamond-shaped shreds.
- Particle-cut shredders create tiny square or circular pieces.
- Disintegrators and granulators repeatedly cut the paper at random until the particles are small enough to pass through a mesh.
- Hammer mills pound the paper through a screen.
- Pierce and Tear-Rotating blades pierce the paper and then tear it apart.
- Grinders are a rotating shaft with cutting blades, which grinds the paper until it is small enough to fall through a screen.
There are alternative shredders that use burning, chemical decomposition, or composting for disposing of the shreds.