It’s a question for the ages, something that has haunted generation after generation behind the closed doors of the bathroom: to use or not to use - paper towel or hand dryer? What to do with those freshly cleaned hands? It's truly a conundrum, and luckily science has the answer: drip dry your hands, or wipe ‘em on your jeans – it’s 100 percent sustainable!
This may not quite resolve the question however (you’d be surprised, not everyone likes to dry their hands on their clothing). So when it’s game time and you’ve got to make a call, what do you go for? The winner of this sustainability showdown is hand dryers.
It’s not because you’re saving trees. Even when you use 100 percent recycled paper towels, hand driers still consume less energy overall. Putting aside energy expended in the production of the machines (the towel dispenser is less here, but they also don’t last as long), calculating the energy costs of the two driers takes a lot of different factors into account.
In a study by The Climate Conservancy, they measured not just CO2 output but also the five other gases that contribute to global warming as set down by the Kyoto protocol: methane, nitrous oxide, PFCs, hydrofluorocarbon and sulfur hexafluoride. The impact of these gasses are measured by their CO2 equivalent (CO2e). With the hand dryer, the output is somewhere between 9g – 40 g CO2e, depending on factors like whether you use the drying cycle once or twice, the type of dryer, and the way the electricity is generated. With paper towel use, assuming two towels used at a time, you’ll rack up around 56 g CO2e.
Why the huge difference? When it comes to hand dryers, you’ve got three major points of consumption and emissions: the manufacture, transport, and energy to run the machine. With paper towels, however, there are a lot more players in the game. There are the environmental costs of logging, turning the paper into pulp or recycling paper, frequent transport of refill rolls, and plastic garbage bags to collect the discarded towels. Also of note is the increased maintenance required when a paper towel system is in place, thanks to messy patrons, according to an article in Slate.
An even larger gap is created when you bring in the big guns, the energy efficient hand dryers, like those made by Dyson, or the Xcelerator dryers that are becoming more and more popular. According to the Excel site, a Life Cycle Assessment determined by an international research firm that determines total environmental impact, concluded that the Excel dryers reduce the carbon footprint of traditional hand dryers and towels both recycled and virgin by 50 to 75 percent.
The excel dryers use less energy than traditional dryers and towels. They can help users become LEED certified, and is the first dryer listed as Green Spec Certified.
What could make hand dryers even more green is the increase of green electricity into our power grids! Support green energy!
Source: BecauseAction.com
