Scraponomics Episode 77 - Document Destruction Day Follow-Up and Why It's Awesome

“I'm not keeping track, but the record is there for someone to break.” — Sammy Sosa

“Mike, we started letting people through at 7:15am. I mean, there were a bunch of people in line and we were ready, so we figured, why not?” Scott, one of Friedland’s operations supervisors, said to me when I got to Friedland this past Saturday. I had just arrived after picking up coffee and bagels for our associates on staff during Document Destruction Day. I could already tell this year was going to be big…

We didn’t just break the record from previous years, which was around 37,000 lbs. We absolutely shattered the record. This year, we shredded 63,422 lbs. of confidential paper documents for the public. But how does this relate to scraponomics?

During the event, we had a few people ask, So what happens to all of this paper? Well, all of the shredded paper from the event created 30.5 bales, none of which are sent to a landfill. No no, the story doesn’t end there. That paper is recycled into new paper, and here’s how.

Each one of those bales are sent to paper mills. Paper mills take the bales we send them, and throw them into a giant blender, add water to it, extract the paper fibers, bleach it to get all of the ink out, and then make new sheets or rolls of paper out of it. Printing companies can then buy these new sheets or rolls to make new products like books and stationary. This process is called re-pulp recycling. So, not only are we confidentially shredding your documents, the shredded pieces get completely destroyed and recycled during the re-pulping process.

This means that because you wanted to confidentially shred your documents, together we’ve prevented over 610 future trees from being cut down, and around 824 cubic feet of landfill space from being used. To everyone who came to DDD this year, thank you. Looking forward to next year!

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