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As trucking business slows, firm takes on document shredding

BY GARY DYMSKI | gary.dymski@newsday.com

10:51 AM EDT, May 7, 2008

Michael Shapiro, owner of Shapiro Trucking Co., stands amid the leavings of the company's new shredding machine. Struggling with higher gas prices and waning demand for trucking services, the 40-plus trucking firm has started a new service shredding documents. (Newsday Photo / Alejandra Villa / May 7, 2008)

For most of the last decade, Massapequa resident Mike Shapiro, owner of Allstar Trucking in Far Rockaway, has watched his client base -- small manufacturers, import-export companies and shops in Manhattan's garment district -- gradually decline.

The softening of the business, compounded by a sagging economy and rising fuel prices, Shapiro said, has put a crimp in trucking services on Long Island, where he does about 90 percent of his business.

What to do?

Expand the trucking company to include secure document shredding, Shapiro decided. "We have the resources," said Shapiro, who recently launched Allstar Secure Shred Llc. "We've been in business for 45 years. . . . It's a natural progression, a way to tweak our business and change with the times."

For the last year the transportation and warehouse industry on Long Island has been flat, said Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association.

Citing research by the state Department of Labor, Kamer said the industry has experienced zero job growth in the past year. This no-growth period directly affects wholesale jobs, she said, because that industry largely relies on trucking for goods distribution. A stagnant transportation industry and growing traffic congestion are reasons Long Island lost 300 wholesale jobs last year, Kamer added.

Shapiro, 65, said the transition to include on-site shredding was an easy one for his trucking firm, which has a 16,000-square-foot warehouse and a fleet of trucks and trailers. The major investment was a commercial shredder-baler, purchased for about $100,000 from Brothers II Brothers Business Machines in Holbrook.

Concerns over identity theft and the passing of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act in 2003, which provided limits on information sharing and consumer privacy, have helped put document shredding in the public eye. In April, a homeless man searching a lower Manhattan trash can found blueprints -- labeled secure and confidential -- for the Ground Zero Freedom Tower.

The shredding business shown some growth. In five years, membership in the National Association for Information Destruction, an Arizona-based trade group, has gone from 175 to more than 1,000, said executive director Robert Johnson.

Shapiro is banking that some trucking clients -- which include Dress Barn and Long Island Staples Nu Horizons Electronics Corp. in Melville and NSI International in Farmingdale -- might make the crossover to his shredding service.

"We have the trucks, and we think we have their trust already," he says. "We're hoping they take the next step."