SHREDDERS PUT BITE ON CLIENTS' DATA; SOUTHLAND CUSTOMERS ASSURED OF SECURE DESTRUCTION OF INFO.

Byline: Jesse Hiestand Daily News Staff Writer

In political terms, the steel teeth of the massive shredders that grind up the top-secret trash of government agencies, banks and a growing number of Ventura County businesses are strictly nonpartisan.

They pulverize paper, floppy disks, videotapes, reel-to-reel data tapes and three-ring binders with equal fury. The same fate awaits mislabeled packaging, unwanted dolls, even old police evidence.

One of the companies that provides this service in the Southland also feeds unopened fan mail sent to movie stars and rejected demo tapes from aspiring rock bands into its industrial-strength shredder.

It's the sort of blind destruction that brings peace of mind to Greg Shapiro, a network administrator at Sunmed, a Westlake Village medical supplies distributor.

``When I dump my critical data in there, I don't worry that someone will go searching through it,'' Shapiro said of the locked bins that hold the confidential info until it is hauled to the City of Commerce headquarters of The Shredders.

Every Thursday at the plant, the secrets of about 200 Ventura County businesses, from the Bank of Ventura to Lucent Technologies, are fed into what is said to be the largest shredder on the West Coast, capable of consuming 20,000 pounds of trash an hour.

The waste is then crushed into 1,800-pound bales and loaded onto railroad cars for delivery to a recycling center.

The sheer amount of trashable yet still sensitive data generated by companies is one of the main reasons document destruction is entrusted to outside contractors. As Shapiro notes, ``I have a shredder at home, and I tend to let my personal stuff stack up because I have to sit there and shred it - page by page.''

Instashred Security Services has about 50 clients in Ventura County that send trash to the company's plant in Rowland Heights or to one of the shredder-equipped trucks that visit businesses each week.

Financial institutions are obligated by federal privacy rules and a duty to their customers to keep a tight rein on confidential data, said Maurice Brewster, vice president of Instashred.

``With just a checking account number, I can use a laptop to make a perfect reproduction of any document such as a check,'' he said. ``That's forcing companies that would throw things in the recycling or trash bins to go out and look for a document destruction company that can guarantee everything will be destroyed.''

Both Instashred and The Shredders guarantee that their customers' trash will be obliterated in less than 24 hours by licensed security guards under constant video surveillance.

``We had a shredder and used to do it ourselves,'' said Betty Davenport, manager of the one-branch Bank of Ventura. ``Our poor little shredder started to burn up because we had so many reams of paper, so it became feasible to hire someone else to do it.''

Business is booming for companies like Instashred, which started in Rowland Heights 15 years ago and now has offices throughout California and the nation.

``The business has grown every year at a clip of 25 to 30 percent,'' Brewster said.

In its three years in business, The Shredders has signed up dozens of banks and credit unions in addition to the Federal Reserve, Internal Revenue Service, American Express, Sprint, Ernst & Young and others, said part owner Jerry Martin.

Document destruction services typically supply their clients with plastic bins that look like those used for curbside recycling but which are locked and have a slot on top to insert paper and other items. There is no need to pre-sort the trash because the industrial shredders can simultaneously grind up paper, plastic and metal, which is later separated at the recycling plant.

``Prior to 1985, when someone was going through a trash can, they were looking for bottles or cans or something to recycle,'' Martin said. ``When the aerospace industry took a downturn, there were a lot of people out of work, so consequently these `Dumpster divers' got a lot more sophisticated. They were looking for customer lists, schematics, financials, whatever they could sell to a competitor or whoever was willing to pay for the information.''

Of course, the car-size machine at The Shredders' plant mangles the usual stuff: used cashier's checks, bank deposit slips, expired coupons and old bus tickets, Martin said.

The entertainment industry is also a regular customer. Capitol Records often sends over discarded demo tapes. Movie studios make confetti of yesterday's scripts.

``We have a lot of very strange requests to shred material for Disney,'' such as shards of cloth used to make toy cribs, Martin said. ``We also have a porno company that sends out pamphlets to its customers. When they get returned, they go right in the bin. They're very explicit.''

Instashred gets its share of odd requests as well.

Police detectives once asked the company to destroy a piece of crime evidence - the hard top of a car. Unsold dolls made for the Olympics have been ground up, as have scraps of material used in a top-secret Defense Department project that Brewster is not at liberty to talk about.

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PHOTO Jerry Martin is part owner of The Shredders, which disposes of companies' top-secret data.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News