How to Dispose of Documents Without a Paper Shredder

Shredding-off the documents and papers are all fun and cool until the shredder machine doesn’t stop working. What if you have extremely urgent documents to be destroyed but your paper shredding machine gives up? What if you have an electrical shredding machine and the power outage occurs at your place? In such situations, people need to find alternative ways of shredding their confidential documents. But, what are those ways? If you have no idea, need not to worry, we are here to help you out in the state of emergency.

Below, in our article, we have mentioned some of the alternative ways that can be used by people for destroying the documents/papers without using a paper shredding machine. Go ahead and read the below pointers carefully.

Paper Shredder

Shred the papers using hand: The first technique of destroying the documents is by shredding the documents using hands. We would like to inform our readers that this method is laborious and is not as secure as the other techniques. However, still, the technique is simple. If you opt for this technique then don’t forget to tear the sensitive portions of the papers/documents into very small and multiple pieces. Also, we would suggest our readers to dispose the shredded pieces intodifferent recycle bins or trash cans. This reduces the chances of people finding the pieces of your confidential documents.

Burn the documents: The second technique of destroying the sensitive documents is by burning them inside a fire pit. Don’t forget to tear your documents in smaller pieces before putting them in fire and start burning them. (Note- break up all the ashes as soon as the fire is put out, this increases the security in case there are any readable pieces of documents left).

Add the documents into your compost: This technique has to be the most eco-friendly approach to destroying the confidential documents. All you have to do if compost the documents along with your food and coffee filters. This allows the paper to break down finely inside the compost pile, and the paper tends to provide carbon which maintains the nitrogen to carbon balance. Before putting your documents inside the compost pile, make sure you tear the documents into small pieces. Overdoing it a single time can disturb the balance of nitrogen and carbon. Also, do not compost the papers that you feel contain the high levels of toxic materials such as in the case of glossy papers.

Use the multi-cut scissors: The most inexpensive and simple way of mimicking the paper shredding machine is by using the multi-cut scissors. The multi-cut scissors, as the name suggests, tends to make multiple cuts at a single time. The multi-cut scissors can effectively work as manual paper shredder. However, the readers should keep this in mind that the multi-cut scissors work similar to the strip-cut paper shredding machines, and hence they do not offer a high level of security (such as in the case of multi-cut shredders). Therefore, it would be better to combine this technique with other techniques to increase the level of security of the documents.