confidential shredding – Crow Recycling

Crowing about confidential office paper shredding to Coventry’s Lord Mayor

Crow Recycling's Lucy Lynch meets Coventry's Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress Crow Recycling's confidential office paper shredding service was something to crow about in front of Coventry's Lord and Lady Mayoress. The Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress stopped by Crow table at the Way Forward networking event organised by Coventry and Warwickshire CDA. They were the guests of honour at the event held at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. Crow Recycling office manager Lucy Lynch explained how Crow provides work placements for disabled people in various ways, one of them by providing a commercial service destroying confidential office documents. She told the mayor how Crow has been going strong for 38 years, originally at the Barras Heath Wholesale Market in Stoke then at the current location on Sparkbrook Street, Hillfields, Coventry. Lucy said: "It was a privilege to meet the Lord and Lady Mayoress, particularly as the mayor has made history by becoming the first Lord Mayor of Coventry to wear a turban." Crow Recycling provides work placements and volunteering opportunities for disabled people, mainly people with learning difficulties. Other commercial services Crow provides are processing aluminium cans for recycling, selling animal bedding and running an arts and crafts second hand shop called a Scrapstore.

From panic to paper shredder

It was a fearful anti Nazi campaigner who created the forerunner of the paper shredders which rumble away every day in the Crow warehouse destroying confidential information. Adolf Ehinger's anti Nazi leaflets were found in his rubbish bin by a prying neighbour who threatened to report him to the authorities. Fortunately the neighbour's words were just an empty threat. But Herr Ehinger was understandably rattled and set about finding a way to shred leaflets before they reached the dustbin. He based his design on a hand operated pasta maker he had in his kitchen, making a machine large enough to shred an A4 piece of paper and then adding a motor. After the war he set up a factory to produce the shredders and selling mainly to government departments. Separately and 26 years earlier an American Abbot Augustus Low of New York invented a paper shredder but his design never left the drawing board.