. One of these is what they do with the vast amounts of paperwork that they produce which needs to be destroyed, either for economical or legal reasons. This is why many of these companies must hire an onsite paper shredding company.
The two reasons why companies destroy paperwork is simple. Storage space is expensive. If a company were to store all of their paperwork the cost of maintaining that storage space on their property or with a filing company would be prohibitive. Secondly, there exists the potential for liability when a company hands on to paperwork that contains information which is private to an individual. If that information is leaked or identity theft occurred, the company that was holding the information could be held liable. Therefore, they have companies come and destroy the paperwork instead.
There are a number of good reasons that most companies choose to use an onsite courier instead of the other options that they have available to them. One is cost. In most cases, it is much cheaper to have a company come to your location and destroy your paperwork rather than having to pay them to haul it all away just to destroy it at their facility instead.
Security is another important reason why many opt for an onsite service. When documents are being hauled away you have no real assurance that they are being destroyed in the way that was initially promised in the contract. When you have a company at your location handling the document destruction it is a snap to have someone check on the progress every so often to make sure that everything is going according to plan.
Another good reason is confidentiality. When you send your documents away to be destroyed you have no way of knowing exactly which employees of the shredding company are going to be handling your sensitive paperwork. On the other hand, every employee of an onsite shredder is going to be right there. You can then have each of those employees sign a confidentiality agreement so that they are legally bound not to reveal any information they may see in those documents. This is a good business practice for ensuring beyond any doubt that you will have protected the information in the paper you are having shredded.