Docu Shred expands business with new warehouse, baler in East Grand Forks

MINNEAPOLIS (Scrap Monster):  Even as companies think about giving their copy machines a break and reducing their reliance on paper, East Grand Forks' Docu Shred is finding plenty of work.

The company moved in early 2016 to an old potato warehouse just south of U.S. Highway 2, where it added a baler to compact shredded documents that are ultimately shipped out of the state and recycled into paper products. The facility also gives Docu Shred some much-needed space—it was previously located in a cramped office in downtown East Grand Forks.

"We grew enough that we needed to secure our own destiny and move forward with baling ourselves and lining up our own recycling," said co-owner Chad Thorson.

Docu Shred's trucks travel throughout North Dakota and northwest Minnesota to collect and destroy paper documents and other media. The company shreds about 2,000 tons of paper in a year, Thorson estimated.

The large shredders that sit in the back of their trucks take care of paper in a fraction of the time their clients' employees would take doing the same work with smaller equipment. A 2009 white paper from the International Data Corp. said the time U.S. information workers spent managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries in the previous year.

Besides saving their own employees time, companies turn to Docu Shred in an effort to be compliant with privacy regulations. The company, which is certified by the National Association of Information Destruction, provides clients with a "certification of destruction" to confirm the document is no more.

"Anything with any personal information—health care, financial (information)—they're regulated on anything like that," said Operations Manager Kane Aubol.

Chad Thorson and his brother, Jason, own Docu Shred with their father, John, along with Gary Keller. It was a "one-man show" when Bob Roller started it in 2001, Chad Thorson said.

"He did everything—he answered the phone, he drove the truck, he delivered bins," he said.

The new owners took over the business in 2008, and now they have five full-time employees, Chad Thorson said.

The company added a hard drive destroyer about four years ago. Employees slide those devices into a box on the outside of the truck, where a hydraulic arm punches a hole in the hard drive, rendering the data unretrievable.

Docu Shred also destroys other media such as X-rays, compact discs and microfiche.

"There is a lot of different media out there just sitting and people don't know what to do with," Chad Thorson said.

But that doesn't mean the company expects digital information will completely replace the old paper standard any time soon. The U.S. uses about 69 million tons of paper and paperboard each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"Before I started, I never would have thought there was that much paper in Grand Forks," Aubol said. "It's just unbelievable how much paper is getting used and recycled."

Courtesy: www.grandforksherald.com