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My friend's mum died and she has been shredding her documents.
Foolishly I said I'd burn it for her.
20 years of bills and bank statements still in their envelopes which don't burn too well.
I really don't want to pay for someone to shred it and I think the neighbours have had enough smoke.
Any cunning plans?
How sensitive are the documents of a dead person. She lived on her own in a rented flat.
Can I just take them to the tip?
Stick them in a bucket of water and washing up liquid for a couple of weeks?
Buy a large office shredder, shred the whole lot and recycle. When done stick the shredder on eBay.
You don't have a shredder? How do you dispose of unwanted paperwork for your shop?
Put them in rubbish bags into your non-cycling waste bin; they'll probably (?) be incinerated.
Paper - excluding any with a coating - can be composted; so...bills etc, yes; glossy flyers etc, no.
The plastic film in a window envelope won't compost and isn't recyclable so, if you choose to compost the paper, open the envelopes and dispose of them or separate out the film window and only dispose of that.
You won't make this mistake again!
Do you know anyone with a garden incinerator? I've got a 55 gallon drum with a few holes in the sides and it's epic for burning paper fast if you get a bit of a wood fire going in it first.
When registering my friends death the registrar advised us to burn/shred/destroy anything with NI number or National health number on it. Still waiting to finally complete the sale of his house before finalising everything so not crossed the bridge of document destruction yet 😕
Yep, got a garden incinerator . Loose paper burns lovely as does my old fence , reams of paper not so good.
burning reams of paper is pretty hard plus the ash is something else, ive been there with an elderly relative. But you can get a decent shredder for not much, then flog it. You want a cross cut shredder that will do cds/dvds. Its the quickest least messy way unfortunately. Shredder has actually been pretty handy so you may decide to keep it in the end
Soaking in a bath of water is an option if you can deal with the papier mache hippopotamus you will be left with
I put a load of old documents (bank statements, insurance etc) into a big cardboard box surrounded by various other flammable waste (bits of wood etc, all safe) and took it to my local bonfire night. Got there the day before as the guys were building the bonfire and just chucked it in, they surrounded the box with pallets so it was securely buried within the structure.
It was so deep within it that the ash and burning paper never got a chance to escape.
If you try and burn it on top of a normal fire, you'll just end up with charred bits of paper floating everywhere! It needs to be properly inside some kind of incinerator type thing - oil drum with a wire mesh lid or something - to stop all the burning paper just going up as ash.
Pint of petrol
Stick it in the coffin at the crem?
You need one of these 😁
https://burnwellincinerators.co.uk/burnwell-micro-incinerator/
Not terribly practical for a one off.
20 year old gas bills? I'd chuck the lot in recycling.
Top tip if you burn them- leave the ashes for ages & dampen them.
My Dad had a burn up of a load of paperwork in a metal bin. After a couple of hours he thought the ashes had cooled enough to tip into the wheelie bin.
Cue one inferno and a wheelie bin transformed into a mini Ben Hur style chariot!
Stick it in the coffin at the crem?
brilliant idea!
20 year old gas bills? I’d chuck the lot in recycling.
This
Nice one Mr Job I shall investigate.
Just going through this with the father-in-laws paper work. He passed away last month.
we separated all the info with potentially sensitive / financially sensitive stuff. The ordinary stuff just went to the recycling centre. The other stuff we have shredded with our crisis cut shredder over a number of evenings.
I know what a cross cut shredder is but what is a 'crisis cut shredder'?
Only to be in a crisis or emergency?
I'm going through the same issue with my dad's paperwork except I've got 8 filing cabinets full!
He was a self-employed accountant and they're mostly old records for his clients and all well over a decade old so no need to keep them. Currently getting quotes for someone like Shred-It to take it all away as it's easily too much to take to the tip or burn, current best quote is £120 for shredding on-site and taken away.
When I scanned all our home documents I took the paper ones to work in bag loads at a time and went from floor to floor dumping them in the office shredders. The maintenance folk must have been surprised at the sudden volume of confidential work being done.
Some (most? all?) council recycling schemes will take envelopes with plastic windows on, they are removed automatically so you don’t need to faff about doing it yourself.
WHAT
More petrol + garden incinerator + leaf blower aimed at the holes at base of incinerator. You’ll rip through them in no time and possibly melt the incinerator whilst seeing how high you can get the flame to rocket out
Some (most? all?) council recycling schemes will take envelopes with plastic windows on, they are removed automatically so you don’t need to faff about doing it yourself.
Ours explicitly say that they're not recyclable. So it may be some or most, but it's not all.
Aren't there businesses that will shred and recycle?
If there is actually any risk
Just send it to yourself via Evri. You'll never see it again.
put it in the recycling
More petrol + garden incinerator + leaf blower aimed at the holes at base of incinerator. You’ll rip through them in no time and possibly melt the incinerator whilst seeing how high you can get the flame to rocket out
Ever seen those turbo charged woodburners on youtube, made from an old air reciever drum, packed with flammable material, with an old truck turbo plumbed in?
Biological washing powder will apparently dissolve a cadaver in a couple of weeks, including the teef. A few bank statements shouldn't pose any problems...
Add a pinch of salt and eat them as snacks!
£20 and problem solved.
Thanks for the heads up bob a job.
Ooo good outcome and noted 👍🏿
Check through it carefully, some of it might be more interesting than you think. When I went through my old neighbour's paperwork I found a good few things I kept.