Paper Shredding

[mikester]

Burn barrel only works if you stand there the whole time feeding only 1 page at a time. If you are trying to burn banker's boxes worth of files forget it. The paper bundles just char on the outside and inside all your documents will be perfectly readable and remain intact.

Look for a local company that does on site shredding using a self contained truck. They usually charge $20-40 per bankers box to shred at your site. These trucks have shredders that will shred complete phone book or encyclopedia sized items including all bindings like staples and paperclips.

Your wood chipper will handle wood but choke on paper and bindings. It won't chip the paper into little bits.

 

[grsthegreat]

Burn barrel only works if you stand there the whole time feeding only 1 page at a time. If you are trying to burn banker's boxes worth of files forget it. The paper bundles just char on the outside and inside all your documents will be perfectly readable and remain intact.

Look for a local company that does on site shredding using a self contained truck. They usually charge $20-40 per bankers box to shred at your site. These trucks have shredders that will shred complete phone book or encyclopedia sized items including all bindings like staples and paperclips.

Your wood chipper will handle wood but choke on paper and bindings. It won't chip the paper into little bits.

Nonesence, ive been using burn barrels for years. I just stand there and throw in crumpled pages just about as fast as i can while burning. I empty box full of paper pretty quickly. About 12 hrs later theres just a pile of ash. Than i fill barrel with water. Barrel has holes in bottom. Next day just a pile of mush. That mush goes into dump trailer. No one is getting anything out of that mess.

 

[Sprinkler Fitter]

Bonfire?

That is what we typically do. We have an outdoor fireplace on our patio. We burn anything we don’t want to just throw into the garbage as far as private paperwork, but we never burned garbage in there.

 

[sandman2234]

My Bride worked at home and generated a lot of paper that had to be shredded. I would set the shredder next to my easy chair and run paper thru it during the commercials when fast forwarding wasn't allowed. It isn't like there is a hurry to get it done, and why stand around a hot fire when you can be sitting in your easy chair!
David from jax

 

[Sprinkler Fitter]

My Bride worked at home and generated a lot of paper that had to be shredded. I would set the shredder next to my easy chair and run paper thru it during the commercials when fast forwarding wasn't allowed. It isn't like there is a hurry to get it done, and why stand around a hot fire when you can be sitting in your easy chair!
David from jax

We have a hot fire outside most weekends here in Minnesota from about now until March.

 

[Jstpssng]

Here's my shredder.

 

[mikester]

Nonesence, ive been using burn barrels for years. I just stand there and throw in crumpled pages just about as fast as i can while burning. I empty box full of paper pretty quickly. About 12 hrs later theres just a pile of ash. Than i fill barrel with water. Barrel has holes in bottom. Next day just a pile of mush. That mush goes into dump trailer. No one is getting anything out of that mess.

Come on over, I have a couple dozen bankers boxes for you to crumple up every sheet and burn. BTW they are mostly bound documents. Enjoy!

 

[Gem99ultra]

Burn barrel

Burn barrel doesn't work; ask me how I know In fact, trying to burn stacks doesn't work either. The top couple of sheets will burn but then the fire pretty much fizzles out.

Commercial shredders such as the UPS Stores charge $1.00 per pound. Sadly, I found 3 more boxs full of old documents. Total weight is something like 350#. That's a lot of money for papers that I don't want any longer. Yeah, I'm paying the price for previous laziness.

 

[Gem99ultra]

How quick do you have to be rid of the stuff?

Being a do it myself guy, I like the paper pulp idea. I doubt anyone will want to try to recover anything from a soggy mess. If you are in no hurry, why not try some with a five gallon bucket? If it softens up in a day or two, and you can mix it a bit, you could probably dump it on the ground and let most of the water drain out, and throw the soggy mess out in with you normal trash.

Granted probably not a good idea for top secret government stuff, but what do you really have to hide. Probably nothing that would deserve the resources necessary to recover information from a soggy paper pulp mess.

Summer might be better but winter? You could form it into frozen blocks or just into frozen plastic shopping bags...possibilities are endless...good luck.

Nothing to hide of my own stuff actually. I've not been careful at all in discarding my own documents. (Don't tell my spouse, but I usually just toss my old documents in the garbage can.) Spouse, having had a career in the legal field, is close to paranoid about anything with our name, address, phone numbers, and especially anything related to financial documents.
She's spent just about 2 full days feeding a little home-size shredder. Her efforts yielded shredded about 2–50-gallon trash bags of shredded paper, which I then burned in the burn barrel. I might add, she's in no mood to shred much more single sheet shredding, at that rate.
Thanks for the heads-up on trying to run my stacks through my woodchipper. That probably saved my mental coheiress by a lot. My great ideas sometimes (usually) have flaws.
It's looking like I may as well fork up a few bucks and pay the piper.