Office shredder or mobile industrial shredder: when do you choose which?
Almost every office has a paper shredder. Often a small one under the desk, sometimes a larger drifter in the copy room. For the daily flow of printed emails and crossed-out drafts such a machine works fine. But there is a threshold at which an office shredder falls out of its role and mobile industrial destruction becomes the right answer. This article helps sharpen that threshold.
What an office shredder can do
- Throughput: 5 to 50 sheets per pass, usually at DIN P-3 or P-4. Top models reach P-5 but only for a few hours of uninterrupted work.
- Capacity: daily flow of loose documents at the workplace.
- Immediate use: no waiting. You shred what you have just got in hand.
Good for: rough quote drafts, crossed-out printouts, old delivery slips, files in active use that incidentally need to go.
Where the office shredder gets stuck
- Volume. Emptying an archive cabinet with a 30-sheet shredder soon takes a whole day for one employee.
- Staples and paperclips. Many devices stutter on metal objects or wear out faster.
- Hard card, ring binders, folders. An office shredder cannot handle them.
- Optical disks and hardware. A paper shredder is not a CD shredder, nor an HDD shredder.
- Audit evidence. There is no certificate. At an audit you cannot prove anything beyond a log you wrote yourself.
- Chain of custody. Shreds sit in an open bin in the office. Until they are taken away, there is an internal risk window.
Rule of thumb: as soon as you would spend a day or more on an office shredder, choose mobile destruction.
What a mobile industrial shredder does
- Throughput: 1,000 to 3,000 kg of paper per hour, at DIN P-5 as standard.
- Eats everything: staples, paperclips, plastic sleeves, ring binders, clamp binders. No need to remove anything beforehand.
- Immediate compaction into a bale: shreds go into a sealed compactor, not into an open bin.
- Visual oversight: the truck stands at the door, you can watch the process.
- Certificate: complete with date, weight, DIN level, method and end destination.
Between the two: paper bin with collection
Some providers place a sealed paper bin in the office, which is regularly replaced or taken to an off-site shredder. That is a hybrid: it scales better than an office shredder, but adds a transport step in which the contents are still readable. For customers with audit requirements that is awkward: the chain of custody is longer and the bar for ‘appropriate technical measures’ on sensitive data is higher. We wrote extensively on this choice in mobile versus off-site shredding.
The threshold question in numbers
When is mobile a better choice? A rough calculation:
- Volume per year < 100 kg: office shredder is enough.
- 100-500 kg per year: consider an annual mobile clean-up with an office shredder for the in-between.
- 500-5,000 kg per year: a fixed mobile service (once a quarter or a year) fits best.
- More than 5,000 kg or regular large one-off clean-ups: mobile or large sealed consoles with collection.
A ring-binder cabinet contains about 25-35 kg of paper per cabinet. A typical archive room with 30 cabinets sits at around 750-1,000 kg per major clean-up moment.
Combining is often the answer
Most organisations we serve have, alongside our mobile service, an office shredder for daily incidents. Day to day you shred what is on your desk. Periodically, for example after year-end closing, we come round for the bulk from the archive. The certificate we deliver covers the major work and proves ‘appropriate measures’ towards the AP and accountant.
Mobile destruction on site, you see it happen.
The truck pulls up, the archive goes in, shreds leave your premises as a bale. No extra transport step in which your documents are still readable.
Read more about the pickup serviceHow many kilos are in your archive? Request a quote via desnipperaar.nl. We make a fair estimate based on the number of cabinets or metres.