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Over the last 20 years, recycling bins have become a common fixture in most public places and homes. Canadians understand the need to reduce waste, conserve energy, and preserve landfill space. It’s why you, as a business owner, have installed recycling bins throughout the office, making it a point to recycle as much as possible. While these bins are an excellent way to protect the environment, they could be leaving you and your business defenseless against identity theft. As the potential source of a critical security risk, it only makes sense to store and dispose of your recycling properly.

The average office goes through 50 sheets of paper a day. That’s as many as 18,250 sheets of paper in a year! When you think of all the offices across Canada consuming the same amount of paper products, that number becomes absolutely staggering. This is why the recycling bin in your office is essential. Depending on where you live, it can be a blue, green, or grey bin, or it could even be a bag. Regardless of their colour and shape, recycling bins are the best way to divert waste from overloaded landfills. When one tonne of paper is recycled, up to 17 trees are saved and 2.5 cubic yards of landfill space is conserved.

While you can feel better about the positive impact your office has on the environment, the paper your employees place in these bins can be cause for concern. Client and employee information, financial printouts, security passwords, and more can be listed on these sheets. Theft of this confidential information can be a lucrative business for identity thieves, who know to look through unattended recycling bins to find credit and debit card information, social insurance numbers, and other private numbers that can be crucial in opening new bank accounts and charging unwanted purchases to existing credit accounts. In the United States, these fraudulent accounts are responsible for 24.7 million dollars in losses.

This is why laws have been put in place to protect private consumer information. When a business doesn’t follow these protective measures, it can result in expensive, reputation damaging lawsuits. In 2013, Radioshack had to pay a settlement of 5.3 million dollars in a consumer privacy class action lawsuit. The company was sued for having exposed customers’ confidential information to identity theft because it left papers detailing customers’ sensitive account numbers in the trash.

In order to protect your customers’ information from theft and yourself from unnecessary lawsuits, you need to beef up the security surrounding your recycling bins. Relying on your municipality’s recycling programme isn’t enough. A partnership with an environmentally-friendly document destruction company can make sure you dispose of confidential material properly. Our commitment to the environment will allow you just that, as our shredding services offer a reliable collection and destruction for all your paper products. We can award you with a “guarantee of recycling” in addition to a certification of irretrievable destruction of all of your documents. With these guarantees, you can know for a fact that confidential information will be adequately destroyed and recycled. In between our scheduled pickups, we’ll even provide security consoles that will keep your sensitive documents locked away from prying eyes.

Contact us today to see how you can protect both the environment and your confidential data.