Paper Shredders

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

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@dalepd

March 1st, 2005 63

Paper shredders are a necessity these days but they are a pain to use. The smallest can only handle one sheet of paper at a time, which makes shredding a pretty tedious task. The largest cost thousands of dollars and take up a lot of room. Short of an incinerator, is there a better way to shred paper?

My wife has four or five bags of paper to shred, leftovers from a year-end filing. That’s probably a couple of hours of work for me or her to shred. We have a small shredder that’s the size of a waste basket and is very slow. There’s a larger shredder at the office, one that takes 15 pages a minute but price and size make this unpractical for home use. I looked up shredders on epinions and no one seems particularly happy with the lower price models. Also, there are shredding services that will come and pick up paper but I don’t live in an urban area.

I’d be interested to hear good ideas for home-sized solutions to paper shredding.