Have something to hide? Want a convenient way to make confetti you won’t use? Do you feel buried in stacks of paper every time you sit at your desk?

Look no further! The Lockport City Hall has your back. They understand that these are real problems to many people who don’t own a machine paper shredder.

This Saturday, Oct. 18, you have the opportunity to watch your problems be destroyed. Literally. The city hall is hosting a shredding event that is open to the public from 9 AM to noon. And the best part: it’s completely free!

In many popular movies, oftentimes a corrupt CEO will order everything shredded to destroy evidence of a crime, but in real life, everyday people shred papers for simple safety reasons. People have been shredding documents for over a hundred years to protect sensitive or confidential information from fraud, identity theft, and general unauthorized access. People may shred their own documents at home, or in other cases a professional will shred papers to protect information about their client, like a doctor shredding papers with confidential patient information to adhere to HIPPA. 

For a while, people shredded papers with the convenient tools they always had on hand: their hands. This simple process just involved manually tearing paper into many pieces before disposing of it, usually through recycling. Thankfully for them, the first working paper shredder was invented in 1935 by Adolf Ehinger, who, living in Germany at the time, found he needed to quickly destroy all of his anti-Nazi propoganda. Understandably, he was therefore quite motivated. 

Thanks to Ehinger, no longer do overworked interns gaze upon mountains of paper with despair; instead, they enjoy the quick, efficient and satisfying process of feeding the papers into a shredder and watching them be eviscerated. 

However, not everyone is able to own a machine shredder. Lockport City Hall evidently recognizes that, and that those people they likely still have sensitive/confidential documents they must safely dispose of. This led to the creation of the annual free shredding event, because everyone should be able to do this basic thing to protect their identity without cost or hassle.