Odd Jobs that Keep the Area Humming

Jim Hitt boasts that his $215,000 truck, equipped with an on-board shredder, can annihilate 7,000 pounds of paper in less than an hour. More important, it keeps Washington safe from itself.

Its cavernous belly has held the confetti-like remains of an NFL team's playbooks, security guard patches that an armored truck company wanted safely destroyed, snippets of gift cards ditched by Nordstrom, boarding passes tossed by Southwest Airlines, detritus from embassies and the Department of Homeland Security and receipts jettisoned by some of the K Street crowd's favorite restaurants.

Hitt's job: Collect whatever his customers give him, feed it into his truck's pierce-and-tear grinding system, and then dump it all into the nearest recycling station, mangled beyond recognition or salvage.

"This is the future of the old-fashioned office recycling," Hitt says, tapping the side of his 35-foot white truck, all 30,000 pounds of it.

Washington produces a lot of paper, no small share of it confidential -- all those early-stage contract proposals and the mounds of legal and regulatory material that, tossed into a trash bin, might tempt a competitor. In the age of identity theft and concerns over data security, Hitt has found a low-tech niche.

It's one important enough to have its own trade association, the National Association for Information Destruction Inc. In pamphlets with titles such as "Why Shred?" the association lays out a case for why modern life and the modern economy requires careful disposal of pretty much everything.

"Trash is considered by business espionage professionals as the single most available source of competitive and private information," the association notes on its Web site, and further counsels that any business not shredding on a predictable schedule "exhibits suspicious disposal practices that could be negatively construed in the event of litigation or audit."

Hitt calls himself a shredding technician. He's one of four drivers at Secured Shredding Services, the company based north of Baltimore that his wife Julie created three years ago after their three sons were in school full time.

The garbage business brought the couple together about 14 years ago, when they worked sales jobs at Waste Management Inc. in Pittsburgh. He ultimately managed about 600 workers in the mid-Atlantic region. She quit to care for the boys and later cajoled him into joining her fledgling firm.

"This is so much less stressful than what I was doing," said Hitt, 42, as he drove along Ritchie Highway, the shock absorbent seats bouncing his 6-foot-something frame up and down.

"It's more physical, which I like. I'm probably in the best shape of my life, running in and out of offices like this and doing heavy lifting," Hitt said as he tinkered with the truck's Global Positioning System and navigated his way to the next stop.

Hitt pulled up to Allied Waste Services in Capitol Heights, jumped out of the truck, pulled out a two-wheeled collection cart stored on board and zipped into the trash collection company's administrative offices. Inside, he dumped driver route sheets, financial records and other documents into his cart.

Outside, Hitt placed the cart on a lift, flipped a series of switches inside the truck's cab, and set off a loud whir. The lift carried the cart 13 feet up into the air and tilted its contents into a hopper, where a conveyor system carried the paper into the grinder and compacted the shreds into the back of the truck.

A video camera inside the hopper allowed Tina Rucker, an accounts payable clerk at Allied Waste, to witness the shredding.

"Many customers watch to verify that the documents are destroyed," Hitt said. "On a rainy day, some watch from their windows. It only takes a few seconds, which is good."

Hitt got back into the truck, punched another address into the GPS system and drove on to another 13 stops that day. One of the few drawbacks to the job, Hitt says, are the traffic headaches.

For all those hours behind the wheel, he has his Sirius satellite radio to entertain him and a stash of cigars he's not allowed to smoke at home. The scent of air sanitizer lingers in the truck's cab.

"I smoke the most on Fridays," Hitt said. "It's kind of a treat at the end of the week."