If you live in Fairfax County, you can take advantage of free document shredding at one of the following events:
- July 19: Mt Vernon High School, 8515 Mt. Vernon Rd, Alexandria 22309
- Aug. 16: Cooper Middle School, 977 Balls Hill Rd., McLean 22101
- Sept. 20: Braddock District Governmental Center, 9002 Burke Lake Rd., Burke 22015
- Oct. 18: Mason District Governmental Center, 6507 Columbia Pike, Annandale 22003
- Oct. 25: Springfield Governmental Center, 6140 Rolling Rd., Springfield 22152
- The events are for residents, not businesses. You do need to be aware of some restrictions. You cannot have:BINDERS of any type (3-ring, plastic, spiral, metal)
- Plastic document covers
- Wet or moist paper
- Hanging file folders with metal support bars
- Metal binder clips
- Electronic media including computer disks and diskettes or CDs
- Books, either hardback or paperback
- Credit cards
- Magazines, catalogs and newspapers (unless just the page with the address)
- Film or photographs
Also, you will not get any certificate of destruction. Free is definitely a good price. A regular paper shredding service can be rather pricey, but you get the certificates of destruction and the on-site destruction. About the best you can do for price is $40 to get them to come to your site, and then you pay $10 to $25 per banker's box. A banker's box is roughly a cubic foot of space, so a cubic yard of files would cost you, best case, $40 plus 27 x $10 or $310.
Let's say you have an office with a lot of paper to get rid of -- 18 cubic yards (the capacity of our Junk King truck). If you call a shredder, you'll pay, best case, $4,900.
Junk King could haul that same paper straight to the Covanta plant where they burn it at 1,800 degrees to make electricity. We would haul that amount for $600. Also, you don't have spend hours pulling the files out of plastic folders and three-ring binders and such. You can save days of your labor. True, you don't get a certificate, but you save days of your labor and $4,300! For that kind of savings, you could follow our truck to Covanta to watch the paper burn. Just saying . . .
