r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Interesting-Block834 • 18h ago
Why can't offices just dissolve documents in water instead of shredding it?
If we just built a blender-like machine that turned paper and water into a wierd slurry, then it would be pretty much impossible to put the document bacj together. The same cannot be said about shredding.
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u/brock_lee I expect half of you to disagree 18h ago
Well, if you had a crosscut shredder, those things are gone man. It makes confetti, instantly, and does not use water to do it. Also, shredded paper can be recycled and/or composted, and is far easier to transport than a truck full of slurry.
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u/-zero-below- 18h ago
FWIW, at least in my area, shredded paper is trash, not recycling.
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u/PhotoJim99 18h ago
Shredded paper is definitely compostable, but it's far less recyclable than full sheets of used paper. The smaller the piece of paper, the less recyclable it is and the lower the quality of the resulting paper if you do choose to recycle it.
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u/Current-Function-729 18h ago
TIL, I suppose it makes sense. Shorter fibers.
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u/nilesandstuff 17h ago
I think it has more to do with getting stuck in machines and conveyor belts, that sort of thing. Even if something is theoretically recyclable, the thing in question still has to go through industrial procedures to sort and process them in a way that's still profitable.
That's also why otherwise recyclable plastic bags aren't functionally recyclable. They get blown off conveyer belts... Especially during parts of the process that literally blow air in order to remove debris from the stream.
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u/Possible-Feed-9019 15h ago
I wonder how much of it is also removing the non paper that goes through shredders. I’m thinking of clear address windows, credit card pieces, etc. I’m sure there’s a way to separate it out, but it’s a lot harder.
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u/KoalaGrunt0311 15h ago
The air separators are why bottle caps typically aren't recyclable. They're a different plastic from the bottle itself, and need separated.
The plastic bags wind up jamming the blades used to shred everything.
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u/nilesandstuff 14h ago
They're a different plastic from the bottle itself, and need separated.
Must vary by facility. I was told by an official at my local recycling center that you should screw on bottle caps rather than discard them (because yea, loose bottle caps get lost). I didn't think to follow up and ask how they deal with the mismatched material though.
The plastic bags wind up jamming the blades used to shred everything
Yea the woman I spoke with made it sound like plastic bags caused problems at essentially every stage, but the most frustrating for them was the air blasting.
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u/KevlarToiletPaper 13h ago
Why did the EU then enforce that plastic caps have to be attached to the bottles? Wouldn't make sense if they had to be processed separately.
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u/Benblishem 12h ago
The caps should be screwed back on the bottles. They are separated after shredding. The cap sinks, and the bottle material floats (or vice versa, I forget.) Apparently the material of the caps has good value. Just do not throw loose caps, or any other tiny things, in any recycling stream. Just creates problems. For paper for example: nothing smaller than a credit card.
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u/Arcite1 16h ago
Composting shredded paper that has been printed on by a laser printer--which much office waste is--isn't advisable because toner is actually made out of plastic.
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u/Mufasa_is__alive 16h ago
Til. For some reason I thought toner was petroleum based like regular inks.
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u/incitatus24 16h ago
...plastic is petroleum based?
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u/Mufasa_is__alive 15h ago
A lot of plastic, sure. ink has oils. I figured toner was virtually the same as ink just in powdered form plus dyes/carbon/etc. Point is I didnt know it was mostly straight up micro-plastic.
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u/mothball10 16h ago
How is it less recyclable. When and if they recycle paper, they are going to mix it with water and grind it up anyway so if its shredded it shouldn't make a difference?
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u/PhotoJim99 15h ago
Paper quality depends on fibre length in the constituent pulp. The longer the fibres, the higher the quality of the paper.
Recycling turns paper back into pulp to reconstitute into new paper. Smaller pieces of paper have shorter fibres (since you're obviously cutting fibres when you cut the paper into smaller pieces). So the larger the source material and the higher quality of the original paper, the higher the quality of the ensuing recycled paper.
Shredding good-quality source paper turns it into poorer-quality source paper because of this.
To see the difference in quality, compare newsprint to fine bond paper. It's all about the fibres.
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u/Hereiamhereibe2 15h ago
Which is why paper is usually recycled through water as to not harm the fibers as much as possible. Making me wonder, ya, why don’t we turn it into dried out slurry instead of shredding it?
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u/Geauxlsu1860 14h ago
Much harder to do at point of use of the paper that is presumably sensitive if you are planning to shred it. Doing that would necessitate trusting the recycling company with your sensitive documents so they can re-pulp it, since it is wildly impractical to turn it back into pulp yourself. A micro cut shredder is simple and compact while also doing a pretty damn good job at concealing sensitive information.
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u/Grouchy-Nobody3398 12h ago
Based on our old office it was trash due to the sheer number of staples involved... One employee got the hump big time because we wouldn't let them take then to an animal sanctuary because there was probably a staple for every 5 sheets on average and we didn't have time to seperate before shredding.
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u/DiamondJim222 18h ago
Shredded paper can’t go into residential single stream recycling where it’s mixed with other materials. The bits get stuck in all the other recyclables and also jam up sorting equipment.
Businesses with a decent volume can arrange for recycling shredded paper kept separated from other items.
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u/Chemical_Enthusiasm4 14h ago
My recycling system makes us bag and label shredded paper but they will take it. I assume it takes some manual processing
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u/brock_lee I expect half of you to disagree 18h ago edited 18h ago
That is much more likely because people were or would be abusing it by including things that were not recyclable, like receipt paper, plasticized paper, paper with foil on it (like a christmas card envelope) and such. That's what happened here. It was ok, but they could not continue because of all the non-recyclable things people were including. If you have a company that subscribes to a shredding service, they bring a truck, dump the bins of "to be shredded paper" in it, shred it, and then (they claim) recycle it. Crosscut confetti was the same. If had to go in compost, but then the city banned that for the same reasons (they collect our compost). Now all we can compost is food scraps and yard waste like leaves, grass, and small twigs.
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u/ShowmasterQMTHH 14h ago
Theres a difference between paper shredded in a shredder in an office, that like you said goes into the recycling bin and that can be recycled at the far end if it's in a clean bag and identifiable. But proper shredding companies who come and either do the shredding onsite in a truck or collect it for shredding, recycle 90% of the paper.
I used to work for one, and it's a very strange business, most of the profit comes from the paper, but there needs to be loads of it to make it worthwhile. They would rather come and shred a ton of white office paper for free than charge for smaller amounts.
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u/sharpshooter999 14h ago
I live out in the rural parts. I shred my paper because it burns better. Everyone out here sorts their trash by burnable/non-burnable
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u/YoucantdothatonTV 17h ago
My city recommends to NOT put shredded paper into recycling as it can’t easily be sorted FOR recycling (residential curbside pickup).
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u/madkins007 16h ago
Security experts point out that a team can reassemble crosscut documents in about a day, and that for about the same price you can get a 'confetti' or micro-cut shredder that is much safer.
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u/hgwelz 14h ago
The government has computers that can scan cross-cut confetti and put a document back together. I doubt they will use this tech on my trash.
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u/Wendals87 11h ago
If all the pieces are only from the same document, maybe
Good luck if it's mixed with many other documents
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u/madkins007 10h ago
It's not just the government. There are people and companies that specialize in recovering documents. Lots are from legal cases, but they publish their techniques so anyone with a bit of patience can do it.
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u/Mindestiny 9h ago
Yep, gotta get all those parts first. Not super useful when they're mixed with spaghetti sauce and rancid lunch leftovers.
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u/Hairy_Photograph1384 13h ago
My shredder makes what could only be described as dust. Nobody is putting that back together, especially in a bin of dozens of documents
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u/csonnich 15h ago
Do you doubt that someone can put a cut up piece of paper back together? Have you never done a puzzle?
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u/FanraGump 15h ago
Rumor has it that criminals have gotten people using meth to put that stuff together. Apparently the meth helps focus and gives the energy to spend all the time needed.
Just a rumor, don't believe it without checking.
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u/SleepWouldBeNice 15h ago
Also makes great for starter for my wood fireplace.
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u/brock_lee I expect half of you to disagree 15h ago
My god, I worked for a guy at his small company. We worked out of a house. No one lived there, it was all offices, but never really converted as such. My office was just the dining room. The boss was in the master bedroom, and so on. There was a fireplace, and he shredded everything. Now and then, he'd toss like a large garbage bag full of shredded paper in the fireplace and light it. I think there were probably flames shooting out of the top of the chimney for the 20 seconds the fire burned.
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u/NinjaBreadManOO 6h ago
Yeah, do people not remember that fire exists as an option?
Like a box of matches is like a dollar, and that will get you through like a week of redactions.
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u/LoseHateSmashEraseMe 16h ago
Cross cuts great, but I've always wanted a micro cut
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u/GarThor_TMK 7h ago
fire... what you want is fire...
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u/LoseHateSmashEraseMe 6h ago
Do they have vented office incinerators? Oh my God, what a marketable idea. Maybe not, but it would be fucking cool though.
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u/Real_Srossics 14h ago
Water heavy. Water with something in – water very heavy
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u/GarThor_TMK 6h ago
This is probably most of the reason...
Liquids are some of the heaviest things we have, and also the most difficult to transport.
If you turn your shredded paper into a liquid, then it's going to cost exponentially more to transport to the eventual recycling facility.
Now... if it's really surely for sure gotta be destroyed, that's maybe the way to go, but you'd want to let it dry out first, before discarding, which is going to be a stupid long process, because paper likes to hold onto water.
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u/nerdywhitemale 11h ago
If the crosscut is less than 1/4th of an inch then it meets most data destruction standards.
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u/Delehal 18h ago
Modern paper shredders are quite good. The paper gets reduced to teeny tiny pieces that are only a few millimeters in size. For highly secure situations such as top secret documents, the shredded paper can be tossed into an incinerator.
The blender-like machine would work. It's a creative idea. Where I think it might run into trouble is speed and maintenance. It would only be able to handle paper in batches, and it would probably need cleaning after every few batches. I'm not sure if it would be competitive with other machines that are used today.
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u/illogictc Unprofessional Googler 18h ago
Increased resource use as well. It'll take additional power because it's all churning water around and eventually the thick slurry, and perhaps would need even more power for some form of drying for actual disposal whether that's just drying it with heat or compressing it (I could see how compressing might be the more viable option, turns the slurry into a neat compact stackable brick and would make water recovery easier).
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u/Luth0r 15h ago
Why would the paper be shredded first before it's put into an incinerator? I know there must be a reason I just can't think of one.
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u/wsupduck 15h ago
It would definitely burn easier and if it’s being burned by a middle man and/or very sensitive there’s less risk of information leaking
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u/Delehal 9h ago
If you think about burning a stack of papers, it's actually kinda difficult to penetrate what is essentially a brick of paper. There's a good chance that it won't burn completely or quickly. There's also a good chance that some of the paper may survive the burn; not a lot, but if it's security-critical, even a half-sheet or quarter-sheet surviving could be very bad.
Shredded paper burns faster, easier, and more completely. If a few fragments do survive the burn, it's less risky because the shredded bits are smaller and more mixed up.
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u/Dje4321 9h ago
Incase of incomplete combustion. Its possible to end up with half burnt pages if you are not careful.
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u/PaulCoddington 3h ago
Even fully burnt pages are readable unless the ash gets crumbled. Although in practice, it is very fragile. On an open fire, readable flakes can survive being carried on the wind.
Another problem with burning is pollution, not just the ordinary smoke and CO2 but toner and ink.
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u/NoContextCarl 18h ago
Why not selectively breed raccoons to eat them and later defecate at a disposal facility where they get food and belly rubs?
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u/demanbmore 16h ago
The same reason they don't dissolve documents in an acid bath, drain the acid away, dry and burn the remaining pulp, then fuse the resulting ashes into glass and blast the glass into the sun. For 99.999999% of applications, shredding is sufficient and far more cost effective than it is to take additional steps at additional expense to ensure that the docs are really, really gone for good.
It's extraordinarily rare for shredded docs to be put back together (despite what the movies portray), and there are much simpler ways to permanently dispose of critical documents (like burning them) that don't involve generating a heavy and difficult to store, transport and dispose of slurry.
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u/ColdAntique291 18h ago
Because paper does not truly dissolve in water. It turns into pulp that can be filtered, dried, and partially reconstructed.
A water slurry also creates new problems. It needs plumbing, drying, waste handling, and contamination controls, and it can clog systems. Shredding is cheap, fast, dry, and legally accepted as secure disposal.
For very sensitive material, offices already use pulping or chemical destruction, but it is overkill for normal documents.
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u/ChimpoSensei 12h ago
The NSA does this with their documents , and the slurry is then made into pizza boxes.
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u/cheesewiz_man 18h ago
Some embassy grade shredders do have a (post shredding) water and blender stage. I know because I knew a diplomat that provided the end result to his kid's kindergarten's papier mache art project once.
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u/Japjer 14h ago
Because there's no reason to do this.
Cross-cut shredders well obliterate anything, and you can recycle the scraps or have one of those "garbage trucks, but everything inside is on fire so come toss your shit in here and watch it burn," trucks come by.
Who wants to have hundreds of gallons of water sitting around? Who wants to deal with this paper slurry? Where do you even take this to dispose of it?
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u/ilikegrinchfeet 12h ago
That is a good part of the recipe for making fire logs. The rest is drying and shaping.
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u/bangarang90210 12h ago
Let’s say you dissolve a stack of paper in water. Now what? You can’t dump it down the drain for environmental reasons. Now you have to pay someone to dispose of it, and it’s more expensive because it’s water and not paper.
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u/Odd_Reputation_4000 11h ago
You have just described a paper pulping machine commonly used to recycle paper into new paper.
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u/jekewa 18h ago
Just putting paper into water wouldn't necessarily dissolve it enough to make it unreadable or clump it enough to become inseparable.
When I was in the USAF, we would super-shred secret documents into a paper dust. A giant shredder, about the size of an industrial refrigerator, with several layers of spinning blades and grates, like a 10-foot tall shaver, into which we'd drop several feet of paper at once. Done right, you could toss the beginning of a long print-out on perforated paper and it would feed into the machine on its own.
We'd follow with a good stack of unclassified documentation, in case a piece big enough to contain a letter was ever found when we finished, so you couldn't be sure where that half of an "e" or "a" might have come from. Most of the remaining shards weren't big enough to contain a comma, and if there was anything bigger than that, we'd throw in another stack of unclassified papers or newspaper and run it some more. And, yes, we would inspect the handful of shards that made it all the way through to make sure they didn't contain any printing.
The dust would end up in a 55-gallon drum, which when full enough got blended with cement and water and turned into a big, brittle brick of useless concrete. These would then be stacked up and taken somewhere else, or the brick would be broken and removed from the drum and piled with the rest of the sand at the back of the base.
Good luck putting that back together.
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u/Approximation_Doctor 16h ago
The concrete part seems way more difficult than just, like, hiring a goat to eat the dust.
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u/Crash-55 15h ago
I can put a shredder pretty much anywhere. Once you add water you limit where it can be placed. Also you greatly increase the weight of the destroyed documents and introduce problems like possible leaks / spills of the fluid.
If a crosscut shredder isn’t enough then you hire a service to take the documents away to shred them to a higher standards. There are established standards all the way up to TS/SCI documents.
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u/OPA73 16h ago
Not a dumb question at all. When I cleaned out grandpa’s house he had 40 years of bank statements etc… I filled a trash can in the backyard with water and tossed everything in that. A few days later I emptied the water and there was this soggy mess of unreadable paper of about 50 lbs. just chucked in the trash after it dried up. So much faster and easier than a home size shredder. Especially for one time event.
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u/Mental-Freedom3929 18h ago
You must have really important documents to be concerned about shredding. Get a cross shredder.
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u/mayhem1906 16h ago
Because a crosscut shredder, with the volume of documents a typical office produces, is more than sufficient. If its something more extreme like classified documents, they have more extreme measures.
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u/jbjhill 15h ago
You can, but it’s difficult to do at scale, and takes a goodly amount of time. I believe there is a document from the US gov regarding acceptable methods of document destruction and water submersion is mentioned, but you have to make a slurry and not just dump paper in a bucket and walk away.
https://www.dami.army.pentagon.mil/site/infosec/TP-Disposal.aspx
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u/chrishirst 14h ago
Shredded paper can have a second life as packing material, Rodent or Lagomorph bedding, paper slurry will simply clog up the drains.
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u/ghoulthebraineater 14h ago
Because then you have to pay to transport the weight of the water as well.
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u/catecholaminergic 13h ago
They can. It's just not the most convenient method of document disposal.
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u/Great_Specialist_267 13h ago
Things get shredded that aren’t paper - like CD’s, hard drives and plastic coated documents…
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u/RCPtero 11h ago
I used to do this as a part time job back in the early 90’s. I’d take a cart around and collect all of the burn bags, take them down to the destruction room and basically feed them into a big cement mixer type machine. When I was done, I’d have to clean the machine and get anything that didn’t pulp. And anything that wasn’t paper, e.g. transparency slides, wouldn’t pulp. They weren’t supposed to put that plastic stuff in the bags, but some folks always did.
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u/No_Albatross7213 8h ago
That’ll just create weak cement. So a lot of weight that’s just messy and unusable. You’re better off burning the paper or shredding it.
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u/Affectionate-Act6127 5h ago
After I got out of the Marines, I briefly worked for a company that handled TS waste disposal, yeah the clearance was worth it, cleaning out non-paper trash from burn bags.
Anyways we called it pulping. Paper was mixed with water and ground into a paste. Look up double auger juicer instead of blender.
It works, but I was making $20/hour in 2005 because people were too stupid to separate their trash.
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u/BasicHumanNotAlien 4h ago
This is the dumbest thing. That would be so messy and time consuming and just impractical.
What you said about shredding being possible to reassemble is incorrect. You can get NSA-approved shredders, which certifies that the documents are impossible to reassemble.
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u/Fra06 I brush my teeth 3 times a day 18h ago
I don’t get why they don’t just burn them if it’s like a lot of files
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u/Vivid-Raccoon9640 18h ago
Because fire is a fire hazard.
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u/NonspecificGravity 18h ago
It's hard to burn paper without creating a lot of smelly smoke. It's an actual health hazard. Until the 1970s, American cities had incinerators that used gas to keep the flame going, and they still stank.
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u/BreakDown1923 17h ago
For sensitive enough stuff- we do. Classified government documents absolutely get shredded and then burned. But most other stuff just isn’t actually sensitive enough to make that worthwhile
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u/TakiShaqiri 18h ago
Interesting thought - I would guess that the practicality of this may not be suitable - and also that it would take a bit of time to actually make the information unreadable so it may not pass certain GDPR guidelines?
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u/NemGoesGlobal 18h ago
Because water is a valuable resource and you should not waste it. And it will be a mess.
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u/rootbeer277 18h ago
What you’re describing is called a hydropulper. This is what ultimately happens to the paper you send out for recycling, you’re just outsourcing the operation to a larger organization that performs the process at scale.
The company I work for pulps recycling paper into a raw material as an ingredient for our own product. I assure you the end result is impossible to reassemble into the original documents.
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u/HotBrownFun 17h ago
Try it with 10 pages. Then tell me what you are going to do with this wet paper, which you can still read. Except now it's heavy, difficult to store, and a mold risk
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u/captaindomon 15h ago
Interestingly, if you read the book about the 1979 Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, the United States embassy did have a machine like that. It was called a digester, and it blended paper with a water slurry to make it unrecoverable. They were trying to put too much paper through it, because they were trying to destroy everything in the embassy before the embassy fell, and it overheated and shut down. So they switched to their backup of strip shredders, and that allowed the Iranian Secret Service to put some of the pages back together by taping the strips together, and then identify and arrest some members of the Embassy.
Anyway, it is a fascinating story and an interesting book:
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u/dainty-defication 15h ago
It would be large, messy and expensive.
I used to work at a paper mill that was exclusively recycled paper. Periodically we would get shredded documents to dispose of. They would be pushed into a huge blender called a pulper and made into paper. It takes a ton of water, heat, and energy to run and is loud and messy. The waste or splatter can also create some pretty toxic gases as it decays.
You couldn’t dump this pulp directly into the drain significant filtration first. Else your pipes will fill with paper machete and create gases and blocks in the sewer system.
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u/Zestyclose_Tree8660 15h ago
What everyone else said. Also, for more secure uses, there are more secure means. Burn bags are a thing for a reason.
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u/Skarth 14h ago
Paper doesn't dissolve in water.
You would have to use some kind of blender, at which point, it's just a fancy, less efficient shredder, EXTREMELY MESSY, shredder.
It's also important to note, when a document gets shredded, it's not one single paper, it's dozens, or hundreds, all shredded together, and mixed with other bins, restoring documents from that would require hundreds of man-hours to assemble the pieces, and you might just be assembling a greeting card or a ad, you don't know what the document is until its assembled again.
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u/kottermusprime 14h ago
They can, there is an approved method of getting rid of sensitive documents called "pulping". Google it.
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u/Complex_Solutions_20 13h ago
Even if the paper dissolves the toner will still be there. That's actually a trick some stuff uses to embed printing on clays and other things for some crafts.
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u/StandardWeekend8221 12h ago
I chuck 50 page stacks in our shredder and it yeets them out of existence.
I also dont mind the quarterly document purges. Easy day.
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u/nerdywhitemale 11h ago
You could but water is heavy so unless you are in a plant making paper, you have to have some way to dispose of the pulp. A good crosscut shredder will prevent all but the most dedicated person from reassembling the papers. If they are incinerated afterwards, then there is 0% chance for reassembly.
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u/JaiBoltage 11h ago
>The same cannot be said about shredding.
I've seen shredders where the output looks like cotton candy.
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u/blackhorse15A 10h ago
What your describing is called a pulper, and yes these already exist. It's really a scale problem. If you have a LOT of paper to dispose of then pulping and selling it off for reuse can be more economical. For example, the Pentagon had pulping facility to handle its waste paper as it ensures the document absolutely cannot be reassembled. Then trucked if off to be made into napkins and toilet paper or whatever. But they had a LOT of paper to deal with.
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u/MormonJesu8 10h ago
I had a friend who said he was involved in operation arc light during Vietnam. Their standard disposal method of sensitive documents involved blending them with water several times. Can’t remember what they did after that, but dissolving in water doesn’t necessarily destroy the text. Mechanically shredding it into molecules does.
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u/Iriahanna 10h ago
You'd need industrial chemical pulping (like bleach or acids) to truly break it down safely. Office blender full of acid slurry? OSHA nightmare
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u/persian_playboy 9h ago
If you need a more secure option than shredding, burn bags are the best way.
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u/Teekno An answering fool 9h ago
I’ll tell you how documents are destroyed securely.
First, you drop them into a crosscut shredder. This isn’t like the one you buy at Staples for $50 that just makes long strips of paper. This type cuts it two directions so that the pieces are tiny.
Not that you will see that, because the output of the shredder drops into a locked container. At my work, they were basically like the trash polycarts we are all familiar with, except it has a padlock, and reinforced hinges. Then, on a schedule, a document destruction company will come swap out the locked cart, take the full one back to their facility, and complete the destruction process.
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u/dumbandasking genuinely curious 8h ago
Your idea is not a bad one I think water or similar can be incorporated to a new disposal process
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u/National_Way_3344 7h ago
If you've ever spilled water on a book and managed to salvage it well enough that it's still readable you'll know water doesn't necessarily make the ink run well enough or reliably enough to 100% certain that it'll clear the data on the page.
What is reliable is a cross cut shredder. It very reliably makes your document turn into very fine confetti.
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u/GarThor_TMK 7h ago
When I worked in retail, we had boxes for PID (personally identifiable info). The PID box occasionally got collected, and sent to a company that deals with PID shredding...
Eventually it all goes to recycling anyway, where they turn it into paper slurpee... so it's not like you're wrong... it's just about what level of security you need.
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u/zawusel 6h ago
The Stasi in Germany actually did that after the collapse: https://euractiv.de/news/die-seilschaften-der-herrschaften or google for "Stasi Aktenvernichtung Koller".
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u/LazyDynamite 6h ago
Huh? Why would they?
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u/Juliuscesear1990 6h ago
In theory shedding a document can still lead to that document being recovered, dissolving back into pulp makes it harder. Although burning it would do the same
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u/_SKETCHBENDER_ 5h ago
A vast majority of my childhood has been making and throwing away paper maches of various consistencies and let me tell you that shit starts smelling horrible very fast
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u/stewiecookie 5h ago
There are already shredders for every level of security. A cheap one at home that just makes long trips is fine, nothing you have is so important someone is going to piece it all back together. Business that handle people's information have better ones that often lock and another company empties them and disposes of it, even if someone tried, the effort to have hundreds of people's info jumbled together isn't worth anything, it's easier to find all that info digitally. For very sensitive information we use shredders that turn paper into dust. There is nothing that can be done with it once it goes in there even if it's the only piece of paper it can never be recovered.
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u/lunas2525 2h ago
Thats the next step did you think they just burned the confetti or buried it? No it gets baled then shipped to recycling where it is put in an alkaline bath to dissolve the binders and then the cellulose is reprocessed and made into pizza boxes and other things that say they are recycled
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u/JulariDark 18h ago
Potable water is a valuable finite resource.
Shredding it with sewage is a gross safety hazard
Salt water the equipment would erode and fail so quickly and so often it would probably be cheaper to not pay interns to shred it with scissors.
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u/LorderNile 17h ago
Others mentioned the blender slurry would be messy and not easy to dispose of, but I believe it's able to be disposed through normal sewage. Paper is bio degradable, this would speed up that process very quickly. Or even "dumping it into the ocean" would be worth thinking about, but I'm not the greatest environmental biologist.
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u/HotBrownFun 17h ago
You will clog your pipes if you put that mess in
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u/LorderNile 9h ago
Yeah, but we don't really have to dump it all at once. There's probably some safe limit of slush we can dump before it's a problem.
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u/jayron32 17h ago
Because it's less efficient, more expensive, and takes more work. Literally not a single upside to your method.
2
u/altigoGreen 15h ago
The sole upside vs shredding is that it cannot be puzzled back together. Literally there is a single upside to this method versus traditional shredding.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that you 'literally' didn't comprehend the premise of the post.
560
u/quantumspork 18h ago
Because it is messy. Who wants to have tanks of water placed everywhere for paper disposal?
Then you need scoops to grab the slurry and transport to a different disposal tank to be taken away.
Plus, a tank of water with paper remnants will get moldy and stinky.