When you send your customers an order, shipping supplies should assist that process. However, used paper should NOT carry customer information from their orders into an open work space bin.
The first step is to print only what your business requires. Most carriers will want a name, address, service code, and a tracking barcode. Your company’s phone number and/or e-mail, product names, or order notes probably do not belong on the outside of the box unless they are specifically requested. Printing less data on the form reduces the amount of data to protect against a bad print-out.
Install a locked paper bin (bin) near every printer and/or packing station. Any misprinted labels, packing slips, return forms, and pick lists must go into this bin rather than the normal dumpster. Clean and empty this bin on a regular basis. Use a crosscut shredder to shred the contents in the bin. The Federal Trade Commission advises businesses to properly dispose of all paper records. Therefore, personal info should never remain readable in your dumpsters.
Don’t rely on just drawing a big black line to “cover” up an incorrect address. Ink can skip some letters/numbers in an address and yet leave your barcode or tracking number clearly visible. Simply tearing down a label does little good since either half could fall back into the same general bin area. Crosscut shredders create very small pieces that make it much harder for someone to put them together again. Large retailers might consider using a bonded shred service to handle the locked bins every week/day.
Before you recycle boxes, ensure a privacy review has taken place. All packaging materials including any labels, mailing sleeves, and/or any inserts placed inside the flaps need to be removed prior to recycling. If you have difficulty removing a label from cardboard, simply remove the portion containing your customer’s data and shred it. At that point, the remaining clean corrugated cardboard can be recycled via your local collection program. This allows for recyclable material to continue to be reused while preventing sensitive information about your buyers from being shipped off with your recyclables.
Prior to designating any roll liner as “paper waste”, take a look at the coating on the roll liner backing sheet. There are many types of coatings that may not be accepted by local paper mills. Contact your waste management provider and ask them where roll liners should be disposed of. Even though blank roll liners generally do contain no identifiable customer data; test sheets and sample prints often do. To avoid confusion among employees regarding which type of roll liners to discard versus recycle, keep these two rules separate.
Finally, ask your staff a simple, direct question: Can someone who is not authorized to see our customers’ private data identify such from this sheet? If their response is yes, then that particular sheet belongs in the locked bin. When ending each employee’s shift, conduct an audit of the floor, printer trays, and/or tape dispensing areas. A well-thought-out plan results in fewer pages printed per shipment, protects the ones that fail, and ensures that clean shipping supplies are sorted accordingly. As a result of implementing this approach, your organization will have less loose paper in circulation and better overall recyclability. Furthermore, sensitive customer data will have one less opportunity to exit through your facility doors.
