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The File Room >> The True Cost of A Shredder

The True Cost of a Shredder

Do you shred paper at your office?  Good.  That means you understand the importance of not just tossing out confidential documents.  But how much are you paying to shred paper using an office shredder?

A few days ago we purchased a standard office shredder from Staples.  It shreds 1 sheet in 5 seconds.  It can take about 4 sheets without jamming.  That means it shreds 1 sheet in about 1.25 seconds.

A ream of paper has 500 sheets of paper in it.  According to www.howstuffworks.com, the weight of the paper refers to a sheet of 17" by 22", 500 sheets of 17" by 22" paper has a weight of 20 pounds.  The paper manufacturer then cuts this sheet down into 8.5" by 11" sheets.  So, for standard 20 pound office paper, a ream weighs 5 pounds.  In other words, 1 pound of paper is 100 sheets.

At the throughput described above, it takes 125 seconds to shred a pound of paper or 2.083 minutes per pound.  At that rate you are shredding paper at the enormous rate of 28 pounds per hour.

So if you are paying an employee $7.00 an hour, you also have to assume that your shredder operates constantly, and it never jams or stops and is fed continuously.  At that rate, you pay about 24.3 cents a pound.

Unfortunately, that machine jams and the instructions say to run it only 3 out of 5 minutes.  At that rate and at the same $7.00 an hour, you pay 40.5 cents a pound.

Rarely do you pay an office worker only $7 an hour.  If you assume that you pay $12 an hour and the shredder runs continuously, you pay 41 cents a pound.  Running at the rate the shredder manufacturer recommends costs 70 cents a pound.

These figures only take into account the cost of the operator.  Adding in hassles such as disposing of the waste, electricity and opportunity cost of the worker would only make the case stronger.

The result?  For offices producing only a few sheets of paper a day, an office shredder makes sense.  Once you begin to shred more than a few sheets of paper, it makes economical sense to hire us to do this work for you, at a fraction of the cost.

Source:  American Document Security