Showdown: Paper Towels vs. Hand Dryers

I ran a post a few weeks ago about Wine and Climate Change, which linked to an article that showed that if you live in eastern North America, it's more environmentally benign to drink imported French wine than Californian. I'm endlessly fascinated by life cycle analysis, so I decided I'd dig up a few more epic showdowns over the next few days. Today, the question that has plagued any environmentally-minded public restroom user: paper towels or hand dryers?

To answer the question, you need to consider everything from the energy required to make and transport the dryer or paper towel dispenser, the energy to harvest trees, pulp them, and turn them into paper (in the case of towels), and the energy required to run the machine (in the case of hand dryers). Fortunately, someone else has done all the dirty work, and it turns out that hand dryers are better than paper towels by a fairly hefty margin. Assuming an equal number of users who choose to dry their hands with either 2 paper towels or 30 seconds of drying, the 5-year impact of a
hand dryer is about 1.6 tonnes of CO2 emissions. The paper towels? 4.6 tonnes.


Fig. 1: The XLerator is the first hand dryer to be LEED certified due to its ability to dry hands in 10 to 15 seconds. It also sounds like a jet turbine, and is the only hand dryer I've ever used that's provoked the thought "is this going to leave a bruise?"

It should be noted that the superiority of hand dryers is pretty sensitive to your personal drying habits. If you can get by with 1 paper towel per use, that drops the impact of paper towels down to 2.3 tonnes. Also, if you happen to prefer more than 30 seconds of drying time, that could be enough to tip the scales in favour of paper towels. Bottom line, as usual: don't waste stuff.

Next up: peanut butter vs. jelly.