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Investing in a shredder for your workplace can help to protect you against data theft and keep your office clutter free.

If your workplace is looking to purchase a new shredder or replace an outdated model, there are three key questions that you should ask yourself during the research process:

• How much do you need to shred and how often?
• What levels of security does your business need from a shredder?
• What features does your shredder need?

What features does your shredder need?

Whilst the needs of every workplace are different and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to shredders, some businesses may wish to go a step further when investing in a new machine.

Safety Features

For confidential or highly sensitive documents you may want additional data protection, beyond that of a high P-rating. Banner’s range of Auto shredders such as Rexel’s do not only help to support GDPR compliance, but on some models, users have the ability to load their documents and walk away; safe in the knowledge that the only way to open the shredder is using a 4-digit PIN code.

Paper jam technology

Paper jams are caused when too many sheets or non-compatible materials are loaded into a shredder. Paper jams can affect work productivity, especially when there are large volumes of confidential documents to shred. Some of our AutoFeed shredders use the latest paper jam technology to ensure seamless shredding and long run times of up to 4 hours.

Page load capacity

The page load of a shredder indicates how many sheets you can load into the chamber for destroying at one time if it is AutoFeed, or how many sheets you can feed through the manual slot in one go if it is a manual shredder. Each shredder will have a maximum page load and this can range from 10 to up and beyond 750 sheets. Essentially, the higher the sheet capacity the quicker you can shred large piles of paper; if this is something key for your workplace then page load should be considered.

Picking a shredder bin

Selecting a shredder bin size based upon sheets stored in the bin rather than the bin size alone. If you are purchasing a shredder for your own personal office, then a shredder with a bin size for 60 sheets would be ample. On the opposite end of the scale, a large office where a shredder would be serving 20 or more users would require a machine with a 600+ sheet bin capacity.

Shredder security

The level of security that your new shredder needs to provide will depend on the sensitivity of the documents that will be shredded. Different shredders will present a different DIN security level, which is shown as a P-rating. The P-rating indicates the number of pieces that a document is shredded into with that particular model; the higher the P-rating, the higher the level of security as the document is shredded into smaller pieces. P-ratings are measured from P-2 to P-7 as seen in the table below.

A P-rating guide can be seen below to help you make the best choice for your office shredder: