Willie Geiser is paid to keep secrets.

As owner of Allshred Services, he is entrusted with confidential documents the south Toledo company in turn mutilates, bails, and sends to a paper mill for recycling into new paper.

Allshred, of 715 Spencer St., is part of the information disposal business, the industry’s name for companies that shred sensitive items.

"Every business has confidential data of some sort," Mr. Geiser said.

He is newly elected to the board of the National Association for Information Destruction, a trade group of 120 such businesses begun five years ago. About 450 companies nationally are involved in document destruction, including Lott Industries, Inc., in Toledo and Metro Secureshred of Toledo in Temperance.

One goal of the trade group is to educate businesses about the potential loss of company secrets when confidential records are left in the hands of ordinary recyclers who may not destroy them before disposal.

"We’re all in a very paranoid business," said Mr. Geiser, 43. The service is growing because privacy issues are increasing and companies are unwilling to discard proprietary information in the trash. Such disposal is not limited to shredding paper, but includes microfilm, microfiche, computer tapes, as well as confiscated black-market goods, research and development prototypes, and clothing, Mr. Geiser said.

"We did shred some confiscated cigarettes that the Ohio Department of Taxation brought to us," he added.

The company’s 15 employees collect, shred and recycle confidential material. A 75-horsepower shredder is capable of mangling items as tough as a claw hammer to ones as small as credit and telephone calling cards, or up to 800 pounds of paper an hour. A mobile unit also is used on some jobs.

After the shredding at the former Eagle-Picher Industries, Inc., factory, bales of multicolored shredded paper are stacked and shipped to paper mills. Nonpaper products that are ground to unrecognizable forms are sent to a landfill.

One growth area for the industry is old uniform destruction. Companies that are replacing clothing that’s worn by employees want to be careful to ensure those uniforms are not used by imposters, Mr. Geiser said.