![Paper shredder - detail-9839](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Paper_shredder_-_detail-9839.jpg)
A paper shredder is a mechanical device used to cut sheets of
paper
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distrib ...
into either strips or fine particles. Government organizations, businesses, and private individuals use shredders to destroy private,
confidential
Confidentiality involves a set of rules or a promise usually executed through confidentiality agreements that limits the access or places restrictions on certain types of information.
Legal confidentiality
By law, lawyers are often required ...
, or otherwise sensitive documents.
Invention
The first paper shredder is credited to prolific
inventor Abbot Augustus Low
Abbot Augustus Low (Gus Low) (1844–1912) was an entrepreneur and inventor from Brooklyn, who lived in St. Lawrence County, New York and was the owner of the Horseshoe Forestry Company.Yuan, JuliBog river: a paradise for manyFebruary 1, 2005 New ...
, whose
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
was filed on February 2, 1909. His invention was however never manufactured because the inventor died prematurely soon after filing the patent.
Adolf Ehinger's paper shredder, based on a hand-crank
pasta maker
Pasta (, ; ) is a type of food typically made from an unleavened dough of wheat flour mixed with water or eggs, and formed into sheets or other shapes, then cooked by boiling or baking. Rice flour, or legumes such as beans or lentils, are so ...
, was the first to be manufactured in 1935 in Germany. Supposedly he created a shredding machine to shred his
anti-Nazi
Anti-fascism is a political movement in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals. Beginning in European countries in the 1920s, it was at its most significant shortly before and during World War II, where the Axis powers were ...
leaflets to avoid the inquiries of the authorities. Ehinger later marketed and began selling his patented shredders to government agencies and financial institutions converting from hand-crank to electric motor.
Ehinger's company, EBA Maschinenfabrik, manufactured the first cross-cut paper shredders in 1959 and continues to do so to this day as EBA Krug & Priester GmbH & Co. in
Balingen
Balingen (; Swabian: ''Balenga'') is a town in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, capital of the district of Zollernalbkreis. It is located near the Swabian Jura, approx. 35 km to the south of Tübingen, 35 km northeast of Villingen-Schwenn ...
.
Right before the
fall of the Berlin Wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall (german: Mauerfall) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, was a pivotal event in world history which marked the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain and one of the series of eve ...
, a “wet shredder” was invented in the former
German Democratic Republic
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**G ...
. To prevent paper shredders in the
Ministry for State Security (Stasi) from glutting, this device mashed paper snippets with
water
Water (chemical formula ) is an Inorganic compound, inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and Color of water, nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living ...
.
With a shift from paper to digital document production, modern industrial shredders can process non-paper media, such as
credit card
A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...
s and
CDs, and destroy thousands of documents in under one minute.
History of use
Until the mid-1980s, it was rare for paper shredders to be used by non-government entities.
A high-profile example of their use was when the
U.S. embassy in Iran used shredders to reduce
paper
Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distrib ...
pages to strips before
the embassy was taken over in 1979, but some documents were reconstructed from the strips, as detailed below.
After Colonel
Oliver North
Oliver Laurence North (born October 7, 1943) is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel.
A veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a National Secu ...
told
Congress
A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...
that he used a Schleicher cross-cut model to shred
Iran-Contra documents, sales for that company increased nearly 20 percent in 1987.
Paper shredders became more popular among U.S. citizens with
privacy concerns after the 1988
Supreme Court decision in ''
California v. Greenwood''; in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the
Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage left for collection outside of a home. Anti-burning laws also resulted in increased demand for paper shredding.
More recently, concerns about
identity theft
Identity theft occurs when someone uses another person's personal identifying information, like their name, identifying number, or credit card number, without their permission, to commit fraud or other crimes. The term ''identity theft'' was c ...
have driven increased personal use, with the US Federal Trade Commission recommending that individuals shred financial documents before disposal.
Information privacy
Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data ...
laws such as
FACTA,
HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA or the Kennedy– Kassebaum Act) is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, 1 ...
, and the
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, () is an act of the 106th United States Congress (1999–2001). It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in ...
are driving shredder usage, as businesses and individuals take steps to securely dispose of confidential information.
Types
![ShredderScissors](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/ShredderScissors.jpg)
Shredders range in size and price from small and inexpensive units designed for a certain amount of pages, to large expensive units used by commercial shredding services and can shred millions of documents per hour. While the very smallest shredders may be hand-cranked, most shredders are electrically powered.
Shredders over time have added features to improve the shredder user's experience. Many now reject paper that is fed over capacity to avoid jams; others have safety features to reduce risks. Some shredders designed for use in shared workspaces or department copy rooms have noise reduction.
Mobile shredding truck
Larger organisation or shredding services sometimes use "mobile shredding trucks", typically constructed as a
box truck
A box truck—also known as a box van, cube van, bob truck or cube truck—is a chassis cab truck with an enclosed cuboid-shaped cargo area. On most box trucks, the cabin is separate to the cargo area; however some box trucks have a door between ...
with an industrial-size paper shredder mounted inside and space for storage of the shredded materials. Such a unit may also offer the shredding of
CDs,
DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...
s,
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
s,
credit card
A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...
s, and
uniform
A uniform is a variety of clothing worn by members of an organization while participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are most often worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency services, ...
s, among other things.
Kiosks
A 'shredding kiosk' is an
automated retail
Automated retail is the category of self-service, standalone kiosks that operate as fully automatic retail stores through the use of software integrations to replace the traditional retail services inside in a traditional retail store. These sta ...
machine (or
kiosk) that allows public access to a commercial or industrial-capacity paper shredder. This is an alternative solution to the use of a personal or business paper shredder, where the public can use a faster and more powerful shredder, paying for each shredding event rather than purchasing shredding equipment.
Services
Some companies
outsource their shredding to 'shredding services'. These companies either shred on-site, with mobile shredder trucks or have off-site shredding facilities. Documents that need to be destroyed are often placed in locked bins that are emptied periodically.
Shredding method, and output
As well as size and capacity, shredders are classified according to the method they use; and the size and shape of the shreds they produce.
*''Strip-cut'' shredders use rotating knives to cut narrow strips as long as the original sheet of paper.
*''Cross-cut'' or ''
confetti
Confetti are small pieces or streamers of paper, mylar, or metallic material which are usually thrown at celebrations, especially parades and weddings. The origins are from the Latin ''confectum'', with ''confetti'' the plural of Italian ''co ...
-cut'' shredders use two contra-rotating drums to cut rectangular, parallelogram, or
lozenge
Lozenge or losange may refer to:
* Lozenge (shape), a type of rhombus
*Throat lozenge, a tablet intended to be dissolved slowly in the mouth to suppress throat ailments
*Lozenge (heraldry), a diamond-shaped object that can be placed on the field of ...
(diamond-shaped) shreds.
*''Particle-cut'' or ''Micro-cut'' shredders create tiny square or circular pieces.
*''Cardboard'' shredders are designed specifically to shred corrugated material into either strips or a mesh pallet.
*''Disintegrators'' and ''granulators'' repeatedly cut the paper at random with rotating knives in a drum until the particles are small enough to pass through a fine mesh.
*''
Hammermill
A hammer mill is a mill whose purpose is to shred or crush aggregate material into smaller pieces by the repeated blows of little hammers. These machines have numerous industrial applications, including:
* Ethanol plants (grains)
* A farm mach ...
s'' pound the paper through a screen.
*''Pierce-and-tear'' shredders have rotating blades that pierce the paper and then tear it apart.
*''Grinders'' have a rotating shaft with cutting blades that grind the paper until it is small enough to fall through a screen.
Security levels
There is a number of standards covering the security levels of paper shredders, including:
''Deutsches Institut für Normung'' (DIN)
The previous
DIN 32757 standard has now been replaced with DIN 66399. This is complex, but can be summarized as below:
*Level P-1 = ≤ 2000 mm² particles or ≤ 12 mm wide strips of any length (For shredding general internal documents such as instructions, forms, expired notices)
*Level P-2 = ≤ 800 mm² particles or ≤ 6 mm wide strips of any length
*Level P-3 = ≤ 320 mm² particles or ≤ 2 mm wide strips of any length (For highly sensitive documents and personal data subject to high protection requirements, purchase order, order confirmations or delivery notes with address data)
*Level P-4 = ≤ 160 mm² particles with width ≤ 6 mm (Particularly sensitive and confidential data, working documents, customer/client data, invoices, private tax and financial documents)
*Level P-5 = ≤ 30 mm² particles with width ≤ 2 mm (Data that must be kept secret, balance sheets and profit-and-loss, strategy papers, design and engineering documents, personal data)
*Level P-6 = ≤ 10 mm² particles with width ≤ 1 mm (Secret high-security data, patents, research and development documents, essential information that is important for your existence)
*Level P-7 = ≤ 5 mm² particles with width ≤ 1 mm (Top secret, highly classified data for the military, embassies, intelligence services)
NSA/CSS
The
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collect ...
and
Central Security Service
The Central Security Service (CSS) is a combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense which was established in 1972 to integrate the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Service Cryptologic Components (SCC) of the United Sta ...
produce "NSA/CSS Specification 02-01 for High Security Crosscut Paper Shredders". They provide a list of evaluated shredders.
ISO/IEC
The
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Art ...
and the
International Electrotechnical Commission produce "ISO/IEC 21964 Information technology — Destruction of data carriers". The
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May, 2018, regulates the handling and processing of personal data. ISO/IEC 21964 and DIN 66399 support data protection in business processes.
Destruction of evidence
There have been many instances where it is alleged that documents have been improperly or illegally destroyed by shredding, including:
*
Oliver North
Oliver Laurence North (born October 7, 1943) is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel.
A veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a National Secu ...
shredded documents relating to the
Iran–Contra affair
The Iran–Contra affair ( fa, ماجرای ایران-کنترا, es, Caso Irán–Contra), often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the McFarlane affair (in Iran), or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States ...
between November 21 and November 25, 1986.
During the trial, North testified that on November 21, 22, or 24, he witnessed
John Poindexter
John Marlan Poindexter (born August 12, 1936) is a retired United States naval officer and Department of Defense official. He was Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor during the Reagan administration. He was convict ...
destroy what may have been the only signed copy of a presidential covert action finding that sought to authorize CIA participation in the November 1985
Hawk missile
The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK ("Homing all the way killer") is an American medium-range surface-to-air missile. It was designed to be a much more mobile counterpart to the MIM-14 Nike Hercules, trading off range and altitude capability for a much s ...
shipment to Iran.
*According to the report of the
Paul Volcker Committee, between April and December 2004,
Kofi Annan
Kofi Atta Annan (; 8 April 193818 August 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founde ...
's ''Chef de Cabinet'', Iqbal Riza, authorized thousands of United Nations documents shredded, including the entire chronological files of the
Oil-for-Food Programme
The Oil-for-Food Programme (OIP), established by the United Nations in 1995 (under UN Security Council Resolution 986) was established to allow Iraq to sell oil on the world market in exchange for food, medicine, and other humanitarian needs f ...
during the years 1997 through 1999.
*The
Union Bank of Switzerland
Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) was a Swiss investment bank and financial services company located in Switzerland. The bank, which at the time was the second largest bank in Switzerland, merged with Swiss Bank Corporation in 1998, to become ...
used paper shredders to destroy evidence that their company owned property stolen from
Jews
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
during the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
by the
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
government. The shredding was disclosed to the public through the work of
Christoph Meili, a security guard working at the bank who happened to wander by a room where the shredding was taking place. Also in the shredding room were books from the German
Reichsbank
The ''Reichsbank'' (; 'Bank of the Reich, Bank of the Realm') was the central bank of the German Reich from 1876 until 1945.
History until 1933
The Reichsbank was founded on 1 January 1876, shortly after the establishment of the German Empi ...
. They listed stock accounts for companies involved in the holocaust, including
BASF
BASF SE () is a German multinational chemical company and the largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters is located in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
The BASF Group comprises subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 80 countries ...
,
Degussa
Evonik Industries AG is a stock-listed German specialty chemicals company headquartered in Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is the second largest chemicals company in Germany, and one of the largest specialty chemicals companies in the ...
, and
Degesch
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (), oft shortened to Degesch, was a German chemical corporation which manufactured pesticides. Degesch held the patent on the infamous pesticide Zyklon, a variant of which was used to execu ...
. They also listed real-estate records for Berlin properties that had been forcibly taken by the Nazis, placed in Swiss accounts, and then claimed to be owned by UBS. Destruction of such documents was a violation of Swiss laws.
[Swiss parliament: ]
Parliamentary Initiative 96.434: Bundesbeschluss betreffend die historische und rechtliche Untersuchung des Schicksals der infolge der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft in die Schweiz gelangten Vermögenswerte
''; in German. Entry in force December 14, 1996. This edict was the legal foundation of the Bergier commission, constituted on December 19, 1996. Articles 4, 5, and 7 made the willful destruction or withholding of documents relating to orphaned assets illegal. On the dates given, see
Chronology: Switzerland in World War II — Detailed Overview of the years 1994-1996
''. URLs last accessed 2006-10-30.
Unshredding and forensics
![Shredded 1979-09-01 1305Z CIA cable from American Embassy Tehran](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Shredded_1979-09-01_1305Z_CIA_cable_from_American_Embassy_Tehran.jpg)
To achieve their purpose, it should not be possible to reassemble and read shredded documents. In practice the feasibility of this depends on
* how well the shredding has been done, and
* the resources put into reconstruction.
The resources put into reconstruction should depend on the importance of the document, e.g. whether it is
* a simple personal matter,
*
corporate espionage
Industrial espionage, economic espionage, corporate spying, or corporate espionage is a form of espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of purely national security.
While political espionage is conducted or orchestrated by governme ...
,
* a criminal matter,
* a matter of
national security.
How easy reconstruction is will depend on:
* the size and legibility of the text
* whether the document is single- or double-sided
* the size and shape of the shredded pieces
*the orientation of the material when fed
*how effectively the shredded material is further randomized afterwards
*whether other processes such as pulping and chemical decomposition are used
Even without a full reconstruction, in some cases useful information can be obtained by forensic analysis of the paper, ink, and cutting method.
Reconstruction examples
*After the
Iranian Revolution
The Iranian Revolution ( fa, انقلاب ایران, Enqelâb-e Irân, ), also known as the Islamic Revolution ( fa, انقلاب اسلامی, Enqelâb-e Eslâmī), was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dyna ...
and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in
Tehran
Tehran (; fa, تهران ) is the largest city in Tehran Province and the capital of Iran. With a population of around 9 million in the city and around 16 million in the larger metropolitan area of Greater Tehran, Tehran is the most popul ...
in 1979, Iranians enlisted local carpet weavers who reconstructed the pieces by hand. The recovered documents would be later released by the Iranian government in a series of books called "Documents from the US espionage Den". The US government subsequently improved its shredding techniques by adding pulverizing, pulping, and chemical decomposition protocols.
*Modern computer technology considerably speeds up the process of reassembling shredded documents. The strips are scanned on both sides, and then a computer determines how the strips should be put together. Robert Johnson of the National Association for Information Destruction has stated that there is a huge demand for document reconstruction. Several companies offer commercial document reconstruction services. For maximum security, documents should be shredded so that the words of the document go through the shredder horizontally (i.e. perpendicular to the blades). Many of the documents in the
Enron Accounting scandals were fed through the shredder the wrong way, making them easier to reassemble.
*In 2003, there was an effort underway to recover the shredded archives of the
Stasi, the East German secret police. There are "millions of shreds of paper that panicked Stasi officials threw into garbage bags during the regime's final days in the fall of 1989". As it took three dozen people six years to reconstruct 300 of the 16,000 bags, the Fraunhofer-IPK institute has developed the ''Stasi-Schnipselmaschine'' ('Stasi snippet machine') for computerized reconstruction and is testing it in a pilot project.
*The
DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011 DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011 was a prize competition for exploring methods to reconstruct documents shredded by a variety of paper shredding techniques. The aim of the challenge was to "assess potential capabilities that could be used by the U.S. w ...
called upon computer scientists, puzzle enthusiasts, and anyone else with an interest in solving complex problems, to compete for up to $50,000 by piecing together a series of shredded documents. The Shredder Challenge consisted of five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the document subject matter and the method of shredding were varied to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants were required to provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document. The overall prizewinner and prize awarded was dependent on the number and difficulty of the problems solved.
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
declared a winner on December 2, 2011 (the winning entry was submitted 33 days after the challenge began) – the winner was "
All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S." using a combination system that used automated sorting to pick the best fragment combinations to be reviewed by humans.
Forensic identification
The individual shredder that was used to destroy a given document may be sometimes be of
forensic
Forensic science, also known as criminalistics, is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly—on the criminal side—during criminal investigation, as governed by the legal standards of admissible evidence and criminal p ...
interest. Shredders display certain device-specific characteristics, "
fingerprint
A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfac ...
s", like the exact spacing of the blades, the degree and pattern of their wear. By closely examining the shredded material, the minute variations of size of the paper strips and the microscopic marks on their edges may be able to be linked to a specific machine.
(c.f. the
forensic identification of typewriters.)
Recycling of waste
The resulting shredded paper can be recycled in a number of ways, including:
*''Animal bedding'' — To produce a warm and comfortable bed for animals
*''Void fill and packaging'' — Void fill for the transportation of goods
*''
Briquettes
A briquette (; also spelled briquet) is a compressed block of coal dust or other combustible biomass material (e.g. charcoal, sawdust, wood chips, peat, or paper) used for fuel and kindling to start a fire. The term derives from the French wor ...
'' — an alternative to non-renewable fuels
*''Insulation'' — Shredded newsprint mixed with flame-retardant chemicals and glue to create a sprayable insulation material for wall interiors and the underside of roofing
See also
*
Baler
*
Industrial shredder
*
Paper recycling
*
Used note
References
{{Paper
American inventions
Office equipment
Paper recycling
Records management technology
Security
Products introduced in 1935