Iron Mountain Sustainable Solutions: Smart Sort

Solution Guides

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

February 26, 20246 mins

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Business Challenge

Organizations are increasingly challenged with embedding sustainable and responsible practices across all facets of their operations, including records and information management.

The volume, velocity, and variety of information that organizations need to manage, store, and protect can be overwhelming. In addition, shifting business processes and staff changes can lead to challenges in identifying legacy records. These factors not only slow sustainability efforts but can increase risk and drive higher costs.

What if you could

Ensure that your records and information management program is compliant with your organization’s retention policies and regulatory requirements
Automate decision-making while accelerating the process of sorting and organizing your paper files
Improve file-level visibility
Eliminate the over-retention of paper records
Support environmental goals related to a circular economy and responsible procurement

Iron Mountain Smart Sort

Smart Sort is a technology-enabled solution that leverages your organization’s records retention policies to sort and organize files according to destruction eligibility, record type, or other unique categories. At the conclusion of your Smart Sort project, you’ll have full file-level visibility into your inventory and can confidently determine—now or in the future—what to retain, defensibly destroy, or digitize. You’ll also be able to provide the necessary records for audits, legal matters, divestitures, or other business needs.

With Smart Sort, you can establish a process to eliminate the over-retention of records and simplify future decisions.
Smart Sort’s process is straight-forward and sustainable:

Iron Mountain’s staff of trained professionals use our proprietary software and workflows to automate decision-making while accelerating the process of sorting and organizing your records.
During the sorting process, Iron Mountain will move files into Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified boxes, helping to support organizational goals related to responsible procurement.
All boxes and files identified for destruction are then processed via Iron Mountain’s NAID AAA+ certified secure shredding workflow, ensuring data privacy. Shredded files are recycled, supporting a circular economy.

How Smart Sort works:

how smart sort works

Example of an average Smart Sort engagement

Pre-project:

27,000 boxes of files stored with mixed retention requirements

Post-project results:

19,000 boxes of files sorted by retention requirements and ready for future disposition decisions

8,000 boxes of files identified for defensible destruction

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 toward their sustainability goals was developed in partnership with 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:

The solution 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 is provided on business processes and calculation methodologies.

Addresses a sustainability challenge

Organizations need to ensure proper information governance. This includes the need to identify all records to make informed decisions about the retention and disposition of files. Smart Sort enables strong governance while also supporting environmental commitments.

Net positive impact

Smart Sort is a solution that compliments an organization’s ongoing records and information management program.
The net-positive ranking was based on the solution’s processes and deliverables. Activities related to the ongoing
records and information management program were not part of the evaluation.

Governance and environmental benefits:

Improved file-level visibility simplifies future decision-making and enables compliance with records retention policies.

The solution reduces landfill waste, promotes a circular economy, and leverages responsible supply chain practices.

Additional considerations:

The scope of the impact assessment for Smart Sort was limited to the process of file identification, sorting, and defensible destruction of eligible items upon completion of the project.

Clear claims backed by a third party

Eco boxes: The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), ensures forests are properly and responsibly maintained to meet economic needs, conserve biodiversity and preserve species, while also taking into account land rights and the rights of indigenous communities and workers.

Secure shredding: Files that are eligible for destruction are processed via our NAID AAA+ certified secure shredding workflow, ensuring data privacy.

Impact reporting: The environmental benefits of paper shredding and recycling are reported through Iron Mountain’s Green Report, which uses the Environmental Paper Network’s calculation methodology.

Product transparency

Each Smart Sort customer is provided with a custom dashboard to allow full transparency into the status and real-time results of their project. The dashboard includes the overall project completion percentage as well as the number of files processed. Additional reporting on specific file-level information is provided based on customer requirements. Our goal is to ensure that each Smart Sort customer is fully engaged and has up-to-date performance information.