Ray Lynch Jr. can tell you dark stories about personal records gone astray. He related how one local company discarded some sensitive documents in the regular trash. Then financial statements identifying an employee’s salary blew out of a garbage truck and ended up on a Bangor-area lawn.

There was “a lot of embarrassment” for that firm, said Lynch, president of Lynco Inc., parent company of Records Management Center and of Central Maine Moving & Storage, both located in Bangor.

Such stories, together with the increasingly stringent federal regulations directing lawyers, doctors and others to take better care of their clients’ information, prompted Lynco Inc., to hire five new employees and open a third subsidiary in January – a document shredding company called Records Management Destruction Services.

Services include pickup of documents to be shredded, transportation of the paperwork in locked containers and presentation of monthly “destruction certificates” to let customers know the job has been completed. The company even has developed an “emergency response team” to keep documents safe if there is an accident during transportation.

Lynch said the region has a growing need for something more industrial than those noisy little paper munchers individuals perch on a small wastepaper basket. Records Management Destruction Services bought a shredder, manufactured by Allegheny Paper Shredders in Pennsylvania, that can chomp 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of paper an hour. The machine then bundles the tiny strips into one strapped bale. The machine’s teeth are hardened steel that can rip a big metal crescent wrench into pieces, said operations manager Michael Carroll.

Destruction Services workers get the occasional comment from acquaintances about being in a business that executives of Enron and WorldCom might have wished they’d used a bit more. But Carroll said the core concern of his customers is a bit more mundane – they simply want to protect clients’ medical, legal, school and other documents from prying eyes while reducing the liability over document storage.

Since January, the shredder has been fed a lot of paper collected from garages, cellars, storage sheds and barns.

“This is not garbage, this is confidential office or personal information,” Lynch said.

Sometimes people just don’t think about the consequences of carelessly handling data, Lynch said. For instance, in one case there was a child who came home from daycare with a drawing on one side of a piece of paper that had letterhead and other sensitive information printed on the other side.

Every misplaced document story like this is fodder for the new shredder business. Lynch points out that information espionage was a $7 billion problem in the United States last year.

It wasn’t a huge stretch for Lynco, Inc. to move into shredding. Its Records Management Center subsidiary already stores more than two miles worth of documents at a climate-controlled warehouse that’s accessible 24 hours a day and is monitored by security systems and guards.

The records are stored in plain cardboard boxes that have bar codes attached on the outside. Each bar code contains a lot of information in a special, secure computer database program. When a patient hasn’t visited his doctor in a while, his records could be stored at the Records Management Center, to be retrieved and delivered to the doctor’s office only when needed again. Removing older documents from cramped and busy offices can clear valuable space and keep records more secure, Lynch said.

And when the time comes for a record stored at RMC to be destroyed, it goes quickly to the shredder and recycling facility.

Fifty businesses are signed onto the destruction system. And while school districts, municipalities, doctors, lawyers and other businesses will comprise most of Record Management Destruction Services’ business, individuals are welcome as well, said George Pelissier, senior manager at Record Management Center, who did most of the research on shredding machines for Lynco.

Just recently a woman showed up at the front desk with a handful of documents, Pelissier said. The documents had their moment on the conveyor belt and she got a destruction certificate, all for $10.