With identity theft on the rise, it is more important than ever to protect your personal details, keeping them out of the hands of those who would use them to gain access to your bank and other accounts, or to secure credit in your name.

Many of us throw away documents containing personal information regularly, without giving any thought to how the details they contain might be used by criminals intent on benefiting from other’s rubbish. Destroying the documents that you have no need for is the best approach, and this is exactly what shredders are designed to do – they take in the paper and reduce it to strips or squares of paper making it nigh-on impossible for the document to be reconstructed and read by a would-be identity thief.

Shredders come in two main types, strip-cut and cross-cut, and while both perform essentially the same task, they differ in the level of protection they give against the document being reconstructed.

Strip-cut shredders are the simplest and generally cheapest form of shredder, these, as the name suggests, cut the document into strips generally around 10mm in width. The document is fed into the top of the unit and a motor then automatically takes the paper through the cutters and deposits the strips into the attached waste bin.

Cross-cut paper shredders are the most secure form of destroying a document using a shredding method. These types of shredder not only cut the paper into strips, but have a second blade which cuts across these strips to produce squares of paper, making reforming the document very difficult.

Paper shredders make it easy to destroy documents containing your personal details or any other information that you do not wish others to be able to see.