Shredding and Information Destruction Editing and Proofreading Services

Destruction is the one service where the customer cannot inspect the deliverable. Nobody watches their patient files being shredded or their decommissioned drives degaussed; they receive a certificate and a collection note, and on that basis they tell a regulator, a client or a court that the material is gone. The entire service is a promise, and the paperwork is the only part of it anybody can examine.

We edit what shredding and information destruction providers produce — certificates of destruction and their accompanying detail, chain of custody documentation, collection and consignment notes, service descriptions covering on-site and off-site destruction, security standards and destruction level documentation, media sanitisation and hard drive destruction procedures, staff vetting and clearance documentation, vehicle security and transit procedures, secure container and site survey documentation, environmental and recycling reporting, client audit and witnessed destruction procedures, incident and breach notification procedures, and contract and service level documentation. Our editors work on the paperwork that has to substitute for seeing it happen.

The certificate of destruction and the chain of custody behind it are the entire evidential value of the service, and most certificates prove considerably less than clients assume. A document stating that material was destroyed on a date, signed by the company that destroyed it, establishes that the company says so. We write these so the certificate identifies what was destroyed with enough specificity to be matched to a record — container numbers, consignment references, asset serial numbers for media, weights where individual identification is impossible; so the destruction standard is named rather than described as secure, since a particle size or a recognised standard reference means something and "industrial shredding" does not; so the chain of custody is unbroken and documented on the certificate itself — collected from whom, sealed how, held where and for how long before processing, destroyed by whom and witnessed by whom — because the gap between collection and destruction is the only place the promise can fail; so on-site and off-site services are distinguished plainly, given that clients frequently believe they bought the first and paid for the second; and so any material held overnight is stated as such rather than concealed by a same-day date. Providers whose certificates carry this survive a client audit without a conversation.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client contracts, procedures and security documentation. We are editors rather than security, compliance or data protection advisers, and we offer no view on destruction standards, obligations or procedures. What we can do is make the certificate prove what the client believes it proves.