The shredding of paper is well known but with the increased awareness and legal obligations to shred confidential documents to an unreadable and non re-constructible state, there is a void. In particular, although paper shredders can be designed to achieve the results in terms of size, they tend to have much slower throughput. Conventional apparatuses for shredding paper that deliver acceptable throughput rates produce shred sizing that generally are too large to be acceptable. Conventional systems utilize a screen surrounding the cutting blades to filter paper of a certain size, the larger pieces being shredded again, the smaller pieces passing to the next stage. Once appropriately sized, the smaller pieces pass through the screen. The disadvantage to this system is that staples, paper clips, or other metal may cause sparks within the screen and ignite the paper. In addition, screened apparatus generally have unacceptably low throughput. Thus there is a need for a shredder with increased throughput that produces fine shredding and reduces the possibility of fire during the shredding process.