Document destruction firm Guardian has recycled enough shredded paper since starting up in 2005 to save nearly 11,000 trees, the company revealed yesterday.Guardian, which uses an industrial shredder housed in a secure facility in Southampton, sent 22 shipping containers filled with bales of shredded paper to the US for recycling in 2011.The statistics are impressive: Guardian has recycled nearly 90 percent of the paper generated by the shredding of some 130 million documents.The 1.3 million pounds of recycled paper has been converted into products including toilet paper, tissue paper, napkins and paper towels.Company president Leonard Aitken said yesterday that the paper recycled since Guardian’s inception was sufficient, according the US Environmental Protection Agency and other sources, to save 10,940 trees, 38,600 pounds of air pollutants, 244,500 gallons of oil, 2.6 million kilowatts of electricity and 4.5 million gallons of water.Mr Aitken said the business was still seeing strong demand despite the advance of technology which has caused more documents to be stored electronically.“The only alternatives to my business are shredding in-house or taking it to Tyne’s Bay,” Mr Aitken said. “My business has been growing because clients have opted for a secure and efficient way of destroying their confidential documents.”Guardian’s staff of four collect locked bins containing documents from their corporate clients and take them to the secure location of the shredder, which can shred 1,800 pounds of paper per hour.The paper is then baled and loaded into containers for shipping to recycling facilities in the US.“We took a decision early on to recycle, but that was difficult at first because we were not generating a lot of paper,” Mr Aitken said. “Now we can fill 22 shipping containers in a year.”Guardian’s secure destruction division is part of a wider information management business.Useful website: www.guardian.bm