The True Cost of an Office Shredder

Do you shred paper at your office? Good. That means you understand the importance of not just tossing confidential documents. But how much are you paying to shred paper using an office shredder? About $1.44 a pound or $360 for a 68 gallon container filled with 250 pounds of paper.

Here is how we figured it out. We purchased a standard office shredder from Staples. It shreds 1 sheet in 5 seconds. It can take about 4 sheets without jamming.

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" paper. 500 sheets of 17" by 22" paper have 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. Our shredders can shred about 12,000 pounds per hour – over 400 times as fast as the office shredder.

So how much does that cost? Assume that you pay your “typical” office worker $30,000 a year plus $10,000 in benefits (we wish we could find someone with benefits that low too). With 2,000 hours in a year, this “typical” person’s time is worth $20 an hour.

Assuming that the shredder never jams and runs continuously all day every day, it costs 86 cents a pound for our “typical” person to shred. Unfortunately, those little shredders do jam, and the instructions say to run it only 3 out of 5 minutes. Running the shredder at the rate the manufacturer recommends costs $1.44 a pound. A typical 68 gallon bin holds between 225 and 250 lbs of paper. Using the lower figure, shredding this bin would cost $324.

Finally, these figures only take into account the cost of the operator. Adding in hassles such as disposing of the waste, electricity and the opportunity cost of the worker 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 get over a few sheets of paper, it makes sense to hire us.

If you wish to inquire about these shredding services, please fill in the form or call us at 800.880.3539.