Four Confidential Documents Are Often Missed When Paper Recycling

Having a Clean Desk Policy in place is very important when working at home and in the office as it helps to prevent your confidential documents from falling into the wrong hands. Without a Clean Desk Policy, confidential documents can be missed or forgotten about, resulting in an increased risk of a data breach which could cost your organisation up to $74,000 in fines alone. [1]

So, document and paper recycling can be made easy and simple with our Shred-it Clean Desk Policy, but in the meantime, these are the four types of confidential documents that you might be missing as part of your paper recycling process.

Missed Documents When Recycling in Singapore

When decluttering your desk, filing cabinets and meeting rooms, organisations will often miss some less obvious pieces of confidential information when carrying out home or office paper recycling, and the four main types of confidential documents they forget include:

Sticky notes
Notebooks
Scrap paper
Letters and junk mail

Whether you have used a scrap piece of paper to take some quick notes, have an old notebook filled with meeting notes and agendas, or have a stockpile of mail with names and addresses on, these are documents that need to go in for paper recycling.

Although at as often forgotten as the four documents above, some organisations will also forget these types of confidential documents:

Payslips
Bank documents and account statements
Credit and loan documents
Tax returns and records
Accounting records, documents, receipts, and invoices
Inventories
Management reports
Copies of commercial or business letters sent/received

The first list of four documents may not seem like the most confidential and sensitive of documents compared to the latter, but GDPR recycling in Singapore states that ‘GDPR applies to virtually all types of personal data, being “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.”’ [2] Therefore, these often overlooked documents and paper could result in a breach of GDPR and increase the risk of a data breach. To help prevent this type of incident from occurring, we would recommend putting a Clean Desk Policy in place as previously mentioned, as well as a Shred-it All Policy which will further aid in decreasing the chances of a breach.

Shred-it All Policy

When carrying out your Shred-it Clean Desk Policy and paper recycling it can be time consuming to sort through all the different types of confidential documents, especially if your organisation is utilising a hybrid working model between the home and office. Therefore, introducing a Shred-it All Policy to your employees will take the decision of what paper recycling needs to take place, out of their hands.

Our Shred-it All Policy is utilised in conjunction with our One Time Paper Shredding Service and Regularly Paper Shredding Service. We follow security protocol to help keep confidential information safe every step of the way during the paper recycling process. In addition, Shred-it has a General Waste Disposal Facilities (GWDFs) licence, issued by the National Environment Agency (NEA). The GWDFs licence allows Shred-it’s facilities to receive, store, process or treat different types of waste such as e-waste.

Our fleets are also GPS-tracked so we know where your documents are, and we lock our containers and trucks to keep information safe in transit. Our secure, monitored facilities help protect your information before it’s destroyed. When the process is finished, we provide customers a Certificate of Destruction to guarantee destroyed and recycled documents.

Ensuring your business is recycling paper in a secure manner is something Shred-it can help your organisation achieve through our policy and services. For more information about how our paper recycling services can protect your company, customers, and employees, please get in touch today.

Sources

[1] The Register

[2] CMS Law

Disclaimer: This article is provided for your convenience and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should not take, or refrain from taking, actions based upon the content of this article. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes. Please seek professional legal advice.