With a plant-based approach, various plant employees have access to the material during the sort process. A paper sorter could conceal a sensitive document on his person and leave the property with it.
The bottom line is that either solution requires an amount of trust, but the final decision must be customer-based on what they feel the most secure solution is. This decision, like most, are a trade-off between level of security and cost.
A third solution is to do it yourself. While this may seem cheaper in the short-term, it can often be more expensive. And if you do it internally, there must be policies and procedures to ensure that destruction of sensitive information must be performed only with approved destruction methods including shredders or other equipment approved by the Information Security Department.
Irrespective if you use a mobile-based shredding or a plant-based shredding service, ensure that the service provider is NAID certified and that all documents are secured until they are destroyed. A good SLA is to make sure documents are completely destroyed within 24-hours and a Certificate of Destruction is provided upon completion of this process.
Conclusions
It is clear document destruction in today's world must part of a good system of business processes. This article describes a start of the process. The next article will get into more technical areas such as shred size, digital media and more.
But the bottom line is that if your organization is not careful about what they don't dispose of, it could become your competitors' good fortune and your worst corporate nightmare.