Brian Voerding [2]The other day, customers entering the Office Max in St. Paul’s Midway were greeted by bold signs bearing an urgent message: “Avoid Identity Theft. Protect Personal Information.” Next to them were sprawling displays of home paper shredders, all bearing names intended to invoke fear, awe, and consumerism: The Sentinel. The PowerShred. The Paper Monster.

Lynne, a short, bespectacled Office Max employee, shuffled by and offered packets of coupons to customers. Mail-in rebates on shredders were among the deals. Sales were brisk last month, she said. And for good reason: A section of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act that went into effect June 1 requires all employers to shred the redundant personal information of all employees. This law isn’t just for haughty CEOs, however, or even neighborhood record stores—it’s for you, if you hire anyone for any purpose, like a babysitter, lawnmower, or housecleaner.

Lynne doesn’t own a shredder. She tosses bills and credit-card receipts in the trash, without even tearing them up. She’s not losing sleep over it, either. But others are, and shredding companies, concerned businesses, and advertisers have capitalized on this. Consider Citibank’s ad blitz that features victims speaking with voices of identity thieves, describing the merriment of truly risk-free spending. Couple the new law with these rising fears, and you find a booming $350 million shredding industry prospering both in offices and at home, where the paper trail, despite the wonders of online billing and communication, continues to grow.

No technology seems able to render paper obsolete. There’s been a ten percent increase in the volume of workplace paper during the last decade, in defiance of “experts” who expected its use to drop dramatically with the rise of networked computers. Ironically, email is the main culprit. The irrational impulse to send much of your inbox to the printer has been the biggest boon to the pulping industry. As a result, the average cubicle farmer uses ten thousand sheets of copy paper each year. Print. Read. Repeat.

All those reams generally end up in two places, trash or recycling, which creates security headaches for business espionage experts (yes, people have this job). Similar headaches exist for individuals, with dumpster diving celebrating several years of legalization. Thus shredding, once limited to the paranoid, the neurotic, the ultra-responsible, and the occasional chief executive scoundrel, is becoming wildly popular.

Now that the shredder is destined to acquire a domestic status somewhere between the refrigerator and the waffle iron, drab just won’t do, and on the consumer level, there are hip home alternatives. Michael Graves has designed a lustrous, smiling basket that is sold at Target, and there are handheld personal shredders for on-the-fly jobs. But even the most expensive consumer-level shredder can handle only a dozen sheets at once, and this causes difficulties, since paper must be fed manually, with all paper clips removed.

For the really epic, corporate scandal-level jobs, there are the professional shredders. Shred-N-Go, a company in Plymouth, owns specialized mobile shredding units—trucks—that can demolish three hundred pounds of paper in less than four minutes. That’s about two and a half tons of confetti in an hour.

There are several other local companies with equally fanciful names (could you think of a better one?), including Document Destruction in Lakeville and Minnesota Shredding in Edina. As they are happy to point out, their services are inexpensive, considering the estimated cost of identity theft for a typical individual is around fifteen hundred dollars. Plus, according to Document Destruction’s testimonials, the “professional, yet fun” employees leave everyone “totally pleased.”

The law is clearly on the side of the shredders. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, whose shredding spree was thought to be an obstruction of justice. It turns out that it’s completely lawful for higher-ups to instruct employees to regularly shred or otherwise destroy incriminating documents. This holds perhaps the most important lesson for novice shredding enthusiasts. If you’re shredding documents because you know they could be deleterious to you, then just lie—and make sure you’re shredding something valuable every day.—Brian Voerding