When it comes to securely disposing of voters’ lists, personnel files and other confidential documents in Norfolk County, a standard office shredder doesn’t cut it.
To ensure sensitive information does not fall into the wrong hands, the rural municipality opts for what Norfolk Shredding general manager Randy Westbrook calls “total destruction.”
First, the Waterford-based company collects paper from bins placed in restricted areas of municipal facilities.
Documents are run through a machine that pulls apart each page into irregular-sized pieces. Water is then added to the shredded mess, creating a slurry while separating out staples and plastic.
To be completely sure no text or numbers remain visible, all the ink is drained from the slurry, leaving clean paper fibres that are ready to be turned into new sheets.
“It’s a full recycling method,” Westbrook said, explaining that incineration or “hydro-pulping” are the two legally accepted ways for certified shredding companies to destroy documents.
“There’s so much fraud out there. It’s a privacy aspect,” he said. “All the legislation coming out requires that things be destroyed when they’re no longer necessary.”
At the April 14 Norfolk council meeting, councillors renewed the municipality’s contract with Norfolk Shredding for up to five more years at an annual cost of $11,400.
That is money well spent for an essential service that is “critical to maintaining public trust,” deputy clerk Tracey Rodrigues told The Spectator.
Municipal employees regularly handle “sensitive and confidential information,” including financial records and documents from closed council sessions, Rodrigues said.
Norfolk uses a third-party shredding service to “ensure records are fully destroyed and cannot be recovered, safeguarding residents’ privacy and upholding the highest standards of accountability,” she said.
Thinking green at the printer
A 2023 waste audit found Norfolk’s municipal printers churned out 1.6 million pages at a cost of just over $147,000.
That number has since gone down, helped by the clerk’s department distributing council packages electronically — rather than printing thousands of pages for each meeting — and launching a digital records management system.
“Norfolk County continues to advance toward a more fully digital workplace,” Rodrigues said, noting the county has cut back on the number of shredding bins needed.
Each 210-litre bin can hold about 14,000 sheets of paper, but it is “very rare” the bins are full when Norfolk Shredding makes its monthly pickup, she said.
‘Strange requests’
Securely destroying municipal records is among Norfolk Shredding’s easier jobs.
Medical equipment, vitamins, air compressors and bulletproof vests are just some of the products that have met their end inside the company’s industrial shredders over the years.
“I’ll get strange requests,” Westbrook said. “We destroy pretty much anything and everything.”
Bigger companies typically stick to national paper-shredding contracts, he explained, while small, family-run operations like Norfolk Shredding “have to do a lot of one-offs” for clients whose products reach their end of life, are contaminated, or need to be disposed of in the name of public safety and fraud prevention.
“We have no problem destroying weird things,” Westbrook said.
“We’ve destroyed yogurt. We’ve destroyed flak jackets. We’ve destroyed motorcycle helmets. Truckloads full of shoes. You name it, we find a way.”
By J.P. Antonacci, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 07, 2026 at 06:33
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