@pecan 3.14159265: Oh good. I thought I was the only thinking like that.

@Chumas: That is a whole LOT of work for something a $20 charcoal grill can do just as well.

PETS! Line the cat/rabbit litter box with your sensitive documents. My rabbit does quite a good job ensuring someone's REALLY desperate for my personal info.

For my workplace, we have a large shredder on-site. If we have a ton of stuff that needs to be destroyed, we take it to the city's incinerator. They even let us put it on the conveyor belts and watch the boxes go in the burn chamber via CCTV. I forget what they charge but it's not much.

@legwork: Not at all. These were out as soon as you said "quiet". Loud as hell and mine gets a little too hot for my liking.

Just don't try and dump on a massive amount at once or you get too much ash flying around.

Anyway. Has no one else had a viking funeral for their papers in the woods, bathtub, or drainage ditch?

@alexburrito: My problem with only shredding the sensitive part is that I don't want anyone knowing where I have accounts at all. I don't want people knowing where I do my online shopping, even if they don't see what I bought or what my account number is.

****** PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT ******
If you have paper shredder at home and you also have small children. Please unplug the shredder when you are not using it to minimize the possibility that your child will accidentally shred their own fingers.

[www.cpsc.gov]

@mommiest:

credit cards I cut up and put part of the peices in my house trash and some in work trash and some in the trash at the grocery store, etc. That way even if someone did dig through trash they won't get the whole thing.

option 2: get crafty with it. shred it, then soak it in water and run it through your [designated non food use] blender, strain and press out flat on a screen to dry. trim the edges and use it as homemade fancy notepaper. you can even add pieces of dried leaves and grasses for a super expensive custom look

option 3: i keep a rubbermaid bin on my back deck with the label 'burnable trash' and use those items as firestarters for my cast iron grill or chimenea. i make sure to remove the plastic windows from envelopes before burning and i don't burn stuff with colored ink in the grill because i am not sure whether it's safe to cook with. although i just use the paper to help start the charcoal so it's all burned off before i actually put food on the grill.

sometimes i also cut thick strips of papers and roll them up, tie them with cotton twine and dip them into a can [heated in a pan of water on the stove] full of melted leftover candle drips. these make excellent firestarters to make sure all your papers burn up, or just because you want to take them camping.

most of my sensitive stuff i have to keep a long time anyway, like medical records and tax stuff because the IRS is pretty likely to want to see receipts for all the medical tax breaks i get.

@reynwrap582: Just use WD40, like CamilleR. You could use Pam, and your shredder would smell like buttered biscuits.

@KLETCO: If you only shred once every few months and don't want to buy a shredder, look into professional shredding places. See when they make stops near your home or your office. They aren't cheap, though, compared to a one-time fee of buying a shredder.

@HogwartsAlum: Been there. Couldn't burn trash or leaves. What we did was find an old kettle grill in the trash, brought it home, stuck it in the yard, and burned our sensitive papers in that. We burned leaves in it, too. (HA!) We have a shredder, too, but I like to burn them better....heh heh heh fire.

Oh, and check to see if there is a burn ban in your region first. They may get their noses out of joint if they see smoke.

Certain inks and coatings are toxic to gerbils and hamsters. This is why you don't give newsprint to them to shred up. The same with any printed media.

Save a pet's life. Go cough up for a decent shredder and be done with it.

I imagine you can use a closed charcoal grill as well. I have a shredder though, it's definitely worth the $20-30. (And you can recycle!)

Most folk when needing to burn a page or three will just crumple and ignite and then walk away. Sometimes it will burn down, sometimes it won't. Here is a way to make sure it always burns down and noone can read your documents without the assistance of some very OCD individuals.

First, you need a designated burn can. A 5 gallon metal can is good, I have mine from a paint bucket I saw in the waste bin of a construction site.
Take your can and then drill 30 or so holes in the bottom walls with a 1/2 inch bit. From an inch above the bottom of the can to about a third of the way up. You want plenty of ventilation, but don't make the can beaver-chewed.

Next, take something like heavy chicken wire or perforated metal and make a grid that divides the bottom holed section from the top 2/3rds of the can. Drive some screws through the can walls to serve as supports for it. This is your burn platform where above it there are flames and below it are ashes.

Drill a large hole about an inch wide through the can wall just above the ash grid. This is where you light the paper.

Finally, make another mesh grid to go over the top of the can to prevent flying cinders from sailing away and possibly setting your roof on fire.

To use:
Crumple your paper into small but not tightly packed balls. 1 sheet per ball please. Pack the balls loosly into the can and affix the top grid. Sprinkle a little lighter fluid on top if you want and then light it from the pilot hole.

The flames will draw oxygen through the bottom of the can and stir the paper balls and ashes with just air movement. You can help things along if you give the flaming paper a stir with a fire stick if you wish.
When the flames have died down you can stir the ashes through the ash grid and then wet em all down.

Viola, paper reduction.

Often, the entire document doesn't need to be destroyed, only the part with sensitive info. I cut the bottom MICR account number off the checks and then use scissors to cut into small pieces. (I'm not cheap, I'm space-deprived.)

@madfrog: For parents of young children - rip into shreds and put it in the poopy diapers! This was the only reason I was sorry to see DS potty-trained!

1. Shredded (Cross cut of course.)
2. Burned
3. Flushed out to sea...

Bucket. Water. A few days. Done.

If your city does recycling/composting but charges for garbage, you can let it dry out and now you don't have to pay to throw out the advertiser's crap.

@Elcheecho: The shredded paper makes great kindling because it allows a lot of air between the fuel (paper). For that reason it burns more completely. If you throw a stack of documents in a fire, they don't always burn completely unless you put gas, ligher fluid, etc. on them to ensure they've burned completely.

I also imagine its a lot of fun to destoy something in two ways.

@pecan 3.14159265:

Yes, sign up for any of those to be paperless too. My old neighborhood was very bad with mail, we would meet up with our neighbors often and give them their mail that was in our mailbox or back yard and they would give us our mail. I didn't like the idea of bank/credit card statements arriveing in someone elses mailbox so I signed everything up for paperless.

@OneTrickPony: I'm Brian Fellows and those Gerbils are going to steal my credit.

/obscure SNL reference.

@KLETCO: In addition to the above, I usually go a sheet or two below the stated limit. Often the shredder labors quite a bit when you max it out at its stated limit. So if the shredder says it handles 10 at a time, give it a max of 8. Also, shredders can overheat if you decide you want to have an "Enron Party." It's better to do your shredding in small batches (e.g. once a week).

@pecan 3.14159265: Yeah.. it feeds my meniacal side.. Allthough fire feeds the pyro side.. so it's hard to choose.

@Elcheecho: It does. Small bits of paper reduced to ash, whereas you run the risk of whole pieces of paper burning only partially, or the wind picking up and carrying off a corner of a credit card bill that happens to have your account number on it. If the wind carries off a few pieces of paper that have gone through a cross-cut shredder, you're only contributing to the nests of local birds, not the nestegg of a despicable would-be evil doer.

@madfrog: Don't be so sure. I had a class on data security years ago and the professor brought in several garbage bags he purloined on his way into work that day. The disgust of kitty litter is no match for a good set of rubber gloves. It was pretty scary what we were able to find out about one family from a single weeks trash. Names/ages of parents and kids, their regular schedule (based on couple months worth of calenders they had thrown out) places of employment, credit card and SSNs and that was with just 5 minutes to dig through one bag of their trash. It's amazing what people will just put in the garbage.

Just to be clear. The prof also collected all our pens, paper, cell phones, etc... during this lesson. He also had us sign out pen/paper to write our findings down on. Then we had to shred the paper (after he confirmed it was the page with our notes) before we got our stuff back and were allowed to leave for the day.

@lincolnparadox: "You can always start a forest fire."

Fixed.

@enine: It is definitely important to get your name off very sensitive things, but all people get from spam is your name and address. If that's all it takes to compromise your identity, we're all screwed if someone sees the package I get from Amazon or knows what mailbox I open when I check my mail.

Spam is annoying, but the real concern is the credit card statements, bank statements, utility bills, etc. Things that contain information that people can use to access your bank information or credit card information.

@Nicole: I don't know...I really like the noise shredders make, and it's really fun to feed paper into the shredder.

Rather than shred stop it at the source, get on the do not market lists, the credit reporting one by the .gov and the others. A shredder doesn;t protect you from the stuff that gets misdrected in the mail.

@madfrog: You would be very, very surprised as to what people are willing to go through. Also, kitty litter clumps so as long as you're wearing gloves, you can avoid the nastiness and pull out all sorts of sensitive documents.

When i lived in a place that had a fireplace, I would burn them. Now, I throw them away in the bag with the used kitty litter. No one wants to go thru that bag!

@KLETCO: I have a Staples brand shredder that was $30. I've had it for a year and it works extremely well. It can shred at least 10 sheets at a time, though I usually only shred four at a time because that's usually what I have. It can shred credit cards with ease too.

The key with shredders is to not put too much in them at once, and to know what the buttons do. If your paper gets jammed, don't try to pull it out. My shredder has a third button that reverses the shredding process, so it spits the jammed paper back out and you can reverse the sheet and start shredding from the side of the paper that is still whole.

@tinmanx: It's impossible to rip up paper into very, very small shreds, so small that people would not be able to piece it back together. Cross-cut shredders pretty much grind them into very tiny, tiny pieces of confetti.

The best shredders are the ones government agencies use. They grind the paper into dust.

BUUUUURN!

Granted, a page or 2 is helpful in getting things started, but any significant amount of paper is not advised for burning.