ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 21, 1995 TAG: 9512210064
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: AMBRIDGE, PA.
SOURCE: By HENRY CUTTER Associated Press
DON'T JUST SHRED 'EM. Pulverize 'em, says a company whose business has grown.
Shredding your vital documents - whether they are bank statements or seductive love letters - may not be the way to make sure they are destroyed forever.
Any determined snooper may be able to piece your secrets back together.
Document Services Inc., an Ambridge company that specializes in pulverizing paper, said its method that dices and slices can assure that no one can reconstruct discarded documents.
Founded in 1969 in Detroit, the privately owned company now based near Pittsburgh has nine plants in the Northeast and Midwest. Gross revenues have grown from $4 million per year in 1991 to $13 million this year.
Organizations ranging from the FBI to McDonald's Corp. to the Pittsburgh Pirates pay up to 10 cents per pound to have Document Service's trucks pick up their trash paper and chop it into confetti.
Many of these organizations are looking to ensure privacy, finding it necessary to destroy documents to prevent the curious - and the greedy - from locating classified information.
``Obviously, we have confidential customer information and records that need to be destroyed,'' said Mike Foyle, director of security at Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, a Document Services customer. ``There's information in the accounts that a reasonably well-informed person would be able to commit fraud with.''
Unlike typical paper shredders, which cut documents into narrow strips, paper pulverizers chop the papers into hundreds of oddly shaped scraps. Then, the scraps are thoroughly mixed together and packaged in 1,400- to 1,500-pound bales for recycling.
If a data scrounger happened to find one valuable-looking scrap of paper, the snooper would have to search the rest of the bale to find a piece to fit it. Key pieces might not even be in the same bale, according to William Buhl, president of Document Services.
Nationwide, about 400 companies each destroy an average of 150 tons of confidential papers a month, according to Bob Johnson, executive director of the National Association for Information Destruction in Phoenix.
Companies pay about $115 million a year for document destruction, he estimated.
Financial institutions have shown the most interest in Document Services, with banks, in particular, providing a framework for the company's growth strategy.
Bank mergers, which have been plentiful this year, have helped Document Services branch into different states and regions.
``If you're going to be a vendor to a bank today, you need to be available to a bank wherever it happens to be,'' Buhl said.
He said one of the best examples of inadequate shredding came in 1979, when revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Iran.
The embassy papers had been shredded, but not pulverized, allowing Iranian students to piece the documents back together. The new Iranian government got a landslide of data on U.S. activities.
``There is a better way to do it,'' Buhl said. ``A lot of people will say shredding is fine, but if you really want to get rid of documents, you have to pulverize them.''
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: William Buhl, president of Document Services Inc., withby CNBthe company's product. The stuff used to be important papers.
AP