Shredders... Meh.
If you really want to destroy a document you need to burn it. This office appliance is essentially a furnace, but with a paper feed, like on a printer. The paper is fed one leaf at a time into the furnace to be consumed by the fiery doom within.
Heat from the furnace boils water for tea and coffee making facilities. Steam is used to turn a turbine, in order to power the paper feed mechanism.
Finally, on power-down, the furnace innards compress what remains into tightly packed carbon. By morning, a neat stack of fresh pencils awaits you. These can be used for sketching, equations, or as kindling, to begin the day's destruction of sensitive documents.-- theleopard, Jun 21 2012 Shredder_2fKettle [hippo, Jun 21 2012] Feed the paper into this Charcoal_20pellets_...cultural_20residues [scad mientist, Jun 21 2012] Brilliant idea, [theleopard]! Truly one which identifies its author as a genius.-- hippo, Jun 21 2012 Blast!-- theleopard, Jun 21 2012 Ah but wait... could there not be an icy alternative, that sort of enhances the idea, where documents are instead frozen to near absolute zero temperatures by liquid nitrogen, (that also cools to a lesser degree the milk stored for the tea) the papers then reduced to a powder with repeated blows from a steam driven hammer?-- xenzag, Jun 21 2012 Our large cross-cut shredders are used for disposing of all paperwork (almost nothing goes in waste bins or in general waste) and can take thick, stapled documents. A really good shredder would melt down all the mangled and shredded staples and paperclips and forge these into new staples and paperclips.-- hippo, Jun 21 2012 Is there any idea here for making paper mache logs out of shredded paper? That might work for junk-mail, shreddage, and other paper-to-fuel purposes, only with a sort of mid-term storage vector, rather than going directly to flame, as it were.
Sideways to that, while we've considered oxidation primarily, and xenzag's freeze-drying option - I'm sure there must be other one-way processes that might result in achieving both information destruction, and some level of heat/chemical energy storage. Perhaps digestion of the cellulose in some kind of multi-vatted digestotron, the output of which might be a gooey sludge for the endaubenment of protest slogans on public buildings, and a source of natural gas (perhaps) that could be used to power other forms of appliance in the home.-- zen_tom, Jun 21 2012 I second [hippo]. It's brilliant. Someone needs to asses how much of a CO2 would be released into an office, and how to assure the clean combustion into the usable soot.-- Inyuki, Jun 21 2012 or just sell the material to NASA and they can use it on re-entry shields for vehicles, on a strictly no-peeking basis.
Astronaut just happens to notice page from a memo on faulty re-entry shield materials through a porthole just as capsule begins to hit the atmosphere..-- not_morrison_rm, Jun 21 2012 //You mean a goat ?//
That's not bad...-- theleopard, Jun 21 2012 All good apart from // compress what remains into tightly packed carbon//. Unless the incinerator is carefully balanced to achieve a charcoaliness, there should be very little carbon left.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 21 2012 Charcoaliness: there's an idea. Rather than completely combusting the paper, use it as feedstock for the "Charcoal Pellets From Agricultural Residues" idea [link]. That way a large portion of the chemical energy in the paper is not wasted in the document destruction process, but can be used later. In that process the charcoal is crumbled to a powder and mixed, so the document is detroyed nearly as completely as it would be with normal combustion.-- scad mientist, Jun 21 2012 random, halfbakery