Iron Mountain’s Giant Shredder Gets to Work

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They call it “the grinder.”


It’s one of the largest paper shredding machines on the West Coast and it’s just started operations in Pico Rivera.


Iron Mountain Inc., the Boston-based document management company, recently opened a 58,000-square-foot paper shredding plant, featuring a huge high-speed machine that can handle 20,000 tons of paper a year.


“This is our biggest paper shredding machine in the country, and it has one of the highest processing speeds of 12 tons of paper per hour,” said Vlad Vasak, vice president of process and technology for Iron Mountain.


Prior to this plant opening last month, Iron Mountain served the L.A. region with nine mobile shredders that could be moved from site to site to shred documents at various commercial customers, most especially financial services companies, insurance firms, hospitals and doctors’ offices, he said.


But recent changes in federal and state records laws have increased demand for shredding services. One key driving force is increasing privacy concerns that mandate the destruction of records after certain lengths of time.


“With these changes, more documents than ever before have to be shredded, and some of our customers’ needs just grew too big to be served by mobile shredders,” Vasak said.


Iron Mountain recently finished upgrading its main East Coast shredding facility in New Jersey, featuring a similar high-speed machine. Because the company had no previous shredding facility in Southern California, the Pico Rivera plant on land Iron Mountain leased in 2003 was built to be slightly larger than the one in New Jersey.


The plant operates on one shift per day, five days per week. Vasak said the goal is to go to two shifts per day, if demand warrants it.


Paper products including envelopes, file folders and soft binders constitute more than 95 percent of the material that gets fed into the shredder. The rest are associated non-paper products, chiefly paper clips and hard binders.


Once the material gets shredded, it’s compacted into very dense three-foot by three-foot by five-foot bails, each weighing one ton. Then it’s all trucked away to a recycling facility.


“We leave it up to the recycling facility to sort out the materials that can be recycled and those that have to be disposed of,” Vasak said.

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Howard Fine
Howard Fine is a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Business Journal. He covers stories pertaining to healthcare, biomedicine, energy, engineering, construction, and infrastructure. He has won several awards, including Best Body of Work for a single reporter from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers and Distinguished Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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