Electric Hand Dryers or Paper Towels? Which One is Truly Better and by How Much?

The question has been asked repeatedly, and there are a lot of sources that prove many good points on both sides. Paper towels or electric hand dryers? Usually when you go to restaurants or other places of businesses, in the bathroom you'll see either paper towels or electric hand dryers. With the popularization of green movement, electric hand dryers are starting to win out over the more conventional paper towels. Obviously, paper towels aren't exactly the most environmentally friendly source of drying our hands. Not only do hand towels promote deforestation, the energy cost is also a lot higher.

There are a lot of obvious advantages of using an electric hand dryer over paper towels in the bathroom. It reduces maintenance costs, also, cutting the cost of buying paper towels.They do usually do not have to be serviced much after initial installation. But at an environmental standpoint, they do not require any trees to be cut down. Yearly, a restaurant's paper towel usage adds up to about nine trees being cut down. The huge cost in electric hand dryers is the manfacturing of them, mostly the metal.

But if you factor in the how long they last, nearly 10 years, then that's where the even bigger difference is. Another interesting thing about the paper towels used in the bathroom is that most cannot be recycled, and the ones that can be usually just end up in the trash anyway. Paper towels account to about 35% of space in an landfill, coming in at about 1,000 pounds on average. And even before they are used, they are sibjected to about 20,000 per ton of chemical cleansing.

There are a few downsides to electric hand dryers, though. For instance, some of the older models can be very slow to use. And some can dispute that if you remove all of the paper towels from the restaurant bathrooms than it becomes impossible for a person to clean up spills in the restroom or on the person. Also, the efficiency of paper towels can hardly be questioned. Paper towels are also easy to transport, cutting down time in the bathroom, as you do not have to be stationary while making sure that you hands are as dry as they can be.

The difference between electric hand dryers and paper towels is huge, and the more environmentally conscious choice is clear, but there are a lot of factors that people don't normally consider. With the advancement of hand dryers by companies like Dyson and Excel Dryer, the potential they have can hardly be measured.