Olathe ? The 36-inch-wide line of metal doesn’t look all that menacing, or at least not until it starts moving.

The razor teeth roll in place, juiced by a 200-horsepower engine built especially for this niche business in an Olathe industrial park.

Bales of shredded office paper about 60 tons of it pile up behind Mark LaPoint, sales manager of Security-Shred in Olathe. Below, LaPoint grabs a handful of the finished product, cut into half-inch strips. The company shreds about 1.3 million pounds of paper a month.

The contraption’s canvas conveyor belt acts as a giant tongue, licking up piles of paper bank statements, credit-card receipts, police reports and more that have been tagged for munching by the most powerful shredder in the Midwest.

The machine is so hungry that it takes a Bobcat loader to handle all the food, one scoop at a time.

“We’re doing close to 500 tons a month, and we’re capable of doing a lot more,” said Mark LaPoint, a Lawrence resident funneling files of medical records into the beast just off Interstate 35. “The trick is keeping it fed.”

The massive metallic mouth is the power behind Security-Shred, an operation that can chew up 2 million pieces of paper each hour and spit them out into harmless half-inch strips, their sensitive information digested and pressed into massive bales for disposal.

And while notable shred sessions pop up every now and then such as Arthur Andersen’s recent disposal of Enron Corp. documents the true interest in the process is considerably more long term.

The shredding industry is feeding off of a growing market for secure disposal of sensitive documents and information. With federal laws tightening the privacy of financial data and health documents, and cases of identity theft becoming more common, the demand for Security-Shred and similar operations increases daily.

Security-Shred started in 1994 with a single shredder truck handling 20,000 pounds of paper each month. Since then the company has destroyed more than 100,000 tons of paper, a load that outweighs the displacement of a fully loaded U.S. Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the world’s largest warship.

Taking the lead

And Security-Shred isn’t getting any smaller, with volumes increasing at least 25 percent a year.

“Our industry is one of the very few newer, emerging industries that continues to grow with a slowing economy,” said owner Mike Bender, who graduated in 1987 from Lawrence High School. “Our industry is not going to grow like the Internet did we’re definitely the tortoise and not the hare but our little tortoise is still cruising along while other industries are not moving at all.”

Individual consumers are growing more concerned about their personal information, especially as identity theft becomes more prevalent, said Robert Johnson, executive director of the National Association for Information Destruction in Phoenix. Businesses also are scrambling to protect their proprietary information, ranging from scribbles on a phone message pad to detailed plans for a new product.

Lawmakers increasingly are wading into the fray, he said, with some even mandating the shredding of documents in particularly sensitive cases.

“The future of this business is very promising,” Johnson said.

Security-Shred already has more than 1,500 customers in the Kansas City region, including more than two dozen in Lawrence. Among them are Douglas County, Lawrence Memorial Hospital, Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, LRM Industries, Lawrence school district, Warren-McElwain Mortuary and Dillons and SuperTarget pharmacies.

Security savings

Businesses keep locked containers in their offices that are dedicated for papers deemed necessary for shredding. Security-Shred officials bring a shredding truck to the site or load the boxes for destruction in the massive shredder in Olathe.

Either way, it’s a welcome service for the customers involved. At Douglas County Bank, all papers with numbers or identification marks are heaped into bins for shredding.

“It saves us a tremendous amount of time,” said Pat Slabaugh, executive vice president for the bank, a Security-Shred customer for about five years. “We were doing our own shredding, then hauling it off and having the county bury it all. That’s not very productive. It’s time-consuming.”

Contracting the work out saves the bank 25 percent to 40 percent on its document-destruction costs, Slabaugh said, but the real value comes through the knowledge that the information is being disposed of properly. Security-Shred is fully bonded, insured and secure.

“It gives us some peace of mind,” he said. “These guys were very forward thinking. They saw an opportunity to start this company, and they’ve done a good job. They’re very conscientious. They’re always on time and they take care of you.”

	www.securityshred.com

The Lawrence Police Department uses Security-Shred to destroy old police reports, notes used in court even business solicitations from office supply companies.

“It’s essential,” Sgt. Mike Pattrick said. “If we had to keep each copy that we’ve disseminated, we wouldn’t have any space.”