Dumpster Divers

Dumpsters are rarely, if ever locked, providing easy pickings for dumpster divers.

Dumpster diving impacts companies and individuals alike.

Dumpster divers will rummage through trash looking for anything useful to them. The less scrupulous are looking for bills or other paper with your personal information on it that will profit them, or the media.

Identity theft is an obvious potential crime closely associated with dumpster diving, but not the only one.

Discarding unwanted products in a dumpster has a huge potential for liability issues.

How would you feel if product that you thought had been effectively pulled from the general market came up for sale on the Internet, or at the local flea market?

Dumping your unwanted products in a dumpster provides huge temptation for unscrupulous people to make a quick buck by selling items that you thought you had effectively pulled from the market.

Dumpsters can also be a gold mine for recovering proprietary information about a company, and the dangers are not always obvious when choosing what to simply recycle, and what to shred.

For example, throwing the envelopes that you received your accounts receivable checks into a dumpster gives someone a potentially huge insight to your customer list, as every envelope will likely have a return address.

We recommend that all paper that an office discards should be shredded. It not only saves your company a massive amount of time spent on continuous education and monitoring to avoid human error, the weakest link in efforts to maintain confidentiality, and regulatory compliance, but it ensures that all paper is being recycled in compliance with local, state, and federal laws and regulations.

Valuable prototypes have found their way into dumpsters. Courts do not look favorably on companies legally pursuing industrial espionage, or trade secrets cases, when they have displayed such a cavalier attitude to the disposal of critical company information.

A Google search will reveal over 100, 000 sites dedicated to dumpster diving. It is a sport for many honest people, and a source of additional revenue for both honest and dishonest people.

Even in small towns, web sites dedicated to giving the latest  “Hot Dumpsters to Dive” can be found.

Casually discarding information can result in corporate Hari Kiri, with the potential attendant bad press, crippling fines, and the possibility of illegal, and fraudulent crime, such as Identity Theft.

Casually discarding personal, private information is not merely a crime, it is a serious statement as to what kind of corporate citizen you are.

Discarding shredded information in a dumpster is not only dangerous, (the thief sees one neatly bagged volume of data swag, which even when strip or cross shredded, can be easily reconstituted), but with the advent of strict recycling ordinances in almost every State in America, it’s no longer a legal option.

Violation of recycling ordinances can be as costly, if not more so, than regulatory compliance violations.

On-Site Shredding for even the smallest organization is easily affordable.