Two hundred tons of paper a day -- most of it unloaded from trucks in 65-gallon bins -- arrive at the Iron Mountain plant, which went online May 11. With ceiling-mounted security cameras recording the proceedings, a yellow bin-tipping machine dumps the paper into an enclosed pit where Bobcat plows push it onto a black-belt conveyer.

The mounds of files and folders are carried up the conveyer belt, dumped into a vat, moved onto another conveyer, and fed into a computer-controlled shredder. Inside, an eight-foot grinding wheel spinning at 300 rotations per minute reduces Wall Street's strategic plans and personnel documents to scraps and particles. Then they're compacted by a compression ram into 2,500-pound bales that are machine-tied and shipped to a pulp mill for recycling.

Read more about this plant.