The average American uses 700 pounds of paper every year. Many of those pieces of paper include personal or confidential information, including medical bills, bank statements and more.
Fraudsters continue to be creative with collecting information. While they often use technology as a tool for fraud, they can also gather information from paper documents to impersonate you and amass fraudulent transactions.
You then have to use your own time and money to put things back to rights. At Andrews Federal, we are focused on keeping our members and community safe. To support members and protect their peace of mind, we are hosting a Shred Day event at our corporate headquarters.
Members and community residents can drive up and securely dispose of confidential documents or materials that include personal information.
Shred Day Details
Date: Saturday, September 21, 2024
Time: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Location: 5711 Allentown Road, Camp Springs, MD 20746
Cost: Free to the public (limit two containers per vehicle)
Items that Can Be Shredded:
- Items containing staples and paper clips
- Carbonless forms
- Manila File folders
- Envelopes (w/ and w/o a window or large clasp)
- Non-plastic pocket folders
Items that Cannot Be Shredded:
- Heavy cardboard, metal, or plastic
- Items with spiral binding (metal or plastic)
- Large metal binder clips
- 3-ring binders
- Electronics
- CD-ROMs/CDRs/DVDs, diskettes/floppy disks
- Computer backups or hard drives
Why Is Shredding Documents Important?
Shredding documents provides an added level of safety for your personal information. While you will still need to put other safeguards in place, shredding is an easy, low-tech way to protect your information digitally. Shredding documents can help:
- Prevent Identity Theft: When you shred your financial account statements, credit card offers, medical records, and other sensitive documents, you reduce the risk that your information will become accessible to fraudsters who could then use it to impersonate you or to open accounts in your name online.
- Protect Financial Data: If fraudsters gain access to your financial documents, they can combine different pieces of information (including details from account statements and tax documents) to steal your identity and access your current accounts or open new ones. When you shred these documents, you give them one less avenue to access your money and steal your peace of mind.
- Maintain Privacy: Even if documents do not contain financial or confidential information, they may include information you’d rather not have public. Personal correspondence and other sensitive documents can be shredded to give you additional peace of mind about your privacy.
In addition to keeping your information more secure, shredding documents can also reduce waste.
- Paper Recycling: Shredded paper can be recycled into new products, which conserves natural resources and reduces the need for fresh paper production.
- Waste Reduction: Instead of putting paper into the trash, which ends up in landfills, a Shred Day can help to actively divert paper waste.
- Resource Savings: Recycling shredded paper requires less energy and water compared to producing new paper from raw materials.
Last year, our Shred Day yielded more than 16 tons of paper waste, which we were able to recycle. This year, we hope to collect even more and to use this opportunity to support our members’ financial wellbeing and safeguard their personal information.
Mark your calendars and come out for Andrews Federal Credit Union's Shred Day. Safely dispose of your sensitive documents, reduce resource use and connect with others in your community.