Express Business News

By Sue McAllister and Michele Chandler, Mercury News

In a nondescript warehouse in North San Jose, an employee of Certified Document Destruction feeds heaps of paper into a shredding machine, deftly plucking out dozens of orange plastic medicine vials by hand and chucking them into a separate bin. This load came from a hospital, and the plastic vials will be shredded separately later.

The company's slogan -- ``We Destroy Anything!'' -- means it has occasionally shredded casino chips, computer hard drives and plastic toys. But most of its work is reducing tons of paper documents to illegible scraps.

``We want to be able to provide destruction for most anything that is used in an office environment,'' says Michael Gelinske, the company's general manager.

Certified -- formerly Security Shredding -- was purchased three years ago by family-owned Dalton Enterprises of Anaheim. It has grown from a three-truck operation, Gelinske said, to one with eight trucks, three of them equipped for ``mobile shredding.''

The public's burgeoning fear of identity theft is spurring growth in the document-shredding industry, Gelinske said. ``Our drop-offs went from two or three a week to five or six drop-offs a day'' in recent years, he said.

The number of U.S. shredding companies belonging to the National Association of Information Destruction trade group has doubled to 550 over the past three years.

New legislation is driving that growth. Read Full Article