Save Paper Towels, Save The World

The electric hand dryer was primarily invented as an alternative to paper towels, which in turn are the alternative to wiping your recently washed hands on your pants. But are we really doing more for the world and the environment when we use an electric hand dryer instead of a paper towel?

The Benefits Of Using Electric Hand Dryers

Hand dryers are said to cut the costs of institutions that install them by as much as 90% relative to the cost of paper towels, since hand dryers do not need to be restocked – their stock is electricity, which they draw upon as required. Hand dryers have an average life span of between seven and ten years, quite unlike paper towels which can only be used once, to be discarded once your hands are dry.

The Downfall Of Electric Hand Dryers

All this said, you may be surprised to know that using hand driers isn’t necessarily going to earn you any green-living awards. Say we estimate conservatively that you spend 30 seconds drying your hands. This means that you’ve used about 0.018 kilowatt-hours. Say you do this three times a day for an entire year. In that time, you’ll have run through about 19.71 kWh of electricity. To generate that much electricity results in 26.61 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions – nearly 27 pounds of carbon dioxide, generated just by you. Do a little calculation, and you’ll see that it doesn’t take very many regular bathroom visitors to generate tons of carbon dioxide every day.

Paper Towels And The Environment

  • Now let’s take a look at paper towels.

  • Just like the paper in your printer and your kids’ text books, the main material source for making paper towels comes from trees.

  • And according to the best current statistical estimates, the consumption of paper towels, over the course of an entire year of operation, for one fast food restaurant would call for the felling of nine adult trees, and would result in the creation of around a thousand pounds of landfill waste.

  • Sure, that paper can be recycled, but think about it – how many people do you know that recycle all their paper?

  • And paper towels? Forget about it. Most people flush them, fast food cleaning staff included.

Nonetheless, that thousand pounds of landfill waste doesn’t really hold a candle to the potential million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions than an automated hand dryer might produce in a year, emissions that will contribute to global warming and the overall downfall of the environment.

Practical Uses For The Paper Towel

There are also practical differences to be considered when comparing paper towels to electric hand dryers. Generally, unless they’re using some kind of vigorous shaking technique, most people find hand drying with electric hand dryers to be much slower than drying their hands with paper towels. People also find paper towels to be convenient for wiping spills and mess on their bodies and clothing. You can’t exactly use hand dryers to wipe that cake icing off your face or that spilt coffee dripping down your shirt, now, can you?

Bacteria, Paper Towels And Electric Hand Dryers

  • From the perspective of pure hygiene, scientific studies show that drying your hands with paper towels actually reduces bacteria as compared to using modern jet-air hand dryers, which were found to increase bacteria by as much as 254%.

  • Indeed, some hand dryers commonly used in washrooms were found to aid the spread of micro-organisms through the air and to other people as far as two meters away.

  • Paper towels, by contrast, do not – provided, of course, that they’re properly disposed of.

You can’t discount the fact that micro-organisms that cause disease like the common cold and the N1H1 virus can be reduced by simple hand washing, and could be reduced further by hand drying with paper towels. What we need to do with both these hand drying solutions, as with most of our technological advances, is to find a balance between what we really need with what’s convenient.

If you think you really need to use a paper towel, just take one instead of the usual two. If you really prefer electric hand dryers, go for one of the more efficient modern models, such as those produced by Excel, that dry your hands faster, calling for less electricity. Alternatively, you might also try drying your hands on your pants every now and then.