Iron Mountain Sustainable Solutions: Secure Paper Shredding

Solution Guides

Achieve your sustainability goals through innovative, cost-effective solutions that also protect and manage your information.

February 20, 20246 mins

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Business challenge

Organizations understand the impact of sustainability and many have adopted initiatives supporting circular economy such as zero-waste or landfill diversion goals. However, they are often challenged with disposing or recycling materials which include enterprise, proprietary, or customer data.

Organizations need a solution that allows them to dispose of paper documents to achieve sustainability targets without compromising on data security and increased costs.

What if you could

Enhance your information destruction program, knowing exactly which documents need to be destroyed and remain in compliance with pertinent regulations.
Support the circular economy by recycling paper products without compromising any data.
Elevate your reputation as a sustainable organization by reporting on waste to landfill diversion and achieving your sustainability goals.

Our impact

Iron Mountain recycles an average of 465,970 tons of cardboard and paper each year, enabling a circular economy.

Iron Mountain Secure Paper Shredding

With Iron Mountain Secure Paper Shredding, you get the resources and proven expertise you’ll need to create, implement and monitor a comprehensive information destruction program that is convenient, compliant, cost-effective and sustainable. By leveraging our destruction best practices, you’ll be able to:

Ensure your data is secure with disposal processes certified by the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID).
Leverage Iron Mountain’s network of paper brokers and mills that recycle more than 450,000 tons of paper annually on behalf of our customers.
Access account-specific data on your organization’s shredding activity that is auditable with a Green Report that includes information on waste diverted from landfill and the associated water, energy, and emissions savings.

Our Methodology: Iron Mountain Sustainable Solutions

We recognize the important role we play in our customers’ value chain. We believe we have a responsibility to leverage our sustainable business practices to add value to our product offerings.

Iron Mountain’s method for identifying solutions that can help customers measure and report on progress towards their sustainability goals was developed in partnership with a Fellow from MIT’s Sustainability Lab and received external endorsement from a panel of independent subject matter experts and business leaders. The framework focuses on four core criteria.

Core criteria:

Addresses a significant and clearly defined sustainability challenge.
A comprehensive product lifecycle review of benefits and limitations results in a net positive impact rating.
Sustainability claims are clear and based on a third-party endorsement.
Transparency provided on business processes and calculation methodologies.

Addresses a sustainability challenge

Secure Paper Shredding supports corporate goals related to waste management such as landfill diversion and recycling. Through our secure shredding process, paper is picked up and taken to our facilities to be shredded or it is shredded onsite in our mobile shred units. The shredded materials are then baled and shipped to a paper mill to be recycled into other paper products. Iron Mountain processes more than 450,000 tons of cardboard and paper each year.

Net positive impact

Iron Mountain offers onsite, offsite, one-time, and archival shredding services. A review of each process was performed and used to identify each area of impact to better understand both benefits and risks. The overall ranking for the product was determined to be net positive.

Benefits

Landfill diversion/recycling.

Reduces the need for wood-pulp to be used for creating new paper products.

Enables compliance with customer data privacy and records retention policies.

Additional considerations:

To meet the NAID certification standard the paper is shredded into pieces that are so small it can only be used for a limited category of recycled paper products.

Clear claims backed by a third party

Data privacy:

NAID AAA Certification from i-Sigma.

Privacy+ Certification from i-Sigma.

Sustainability:

Iron Mountain’s Green Report uses the Environmental Paper Network calculation methodology to quantify the environmental benefits of our customers’ shredding activities.

Product transparency

Iron Mountain’s Green Report provides customers with an in-depth look at the environmental benefits of their secure shredding program. We use the Environmental Paper Network (EPN) calculator as the basis for the benefits listed in our Green Report. All of the raw data and calculations are available to customers for use in their own sustainability reporting, ensuring that they can validate all claims about the benefits of their program.