Featured Debate 19

Clearly in your home, you might go with reusable cloth towels or maybe sometimes some recycled content paper towels. 

But what about when you're in a public restroom?  If there's a choice, what do you go?  Go for the paper towel or go for the hand dryer?  (And, yes, I know...there's the option of neither and just wiping your hands on your pants....but what if you weren't wearing pants?  Wait...what?)  Okay, in all seriousness....if you had to choose one or the other, what would it be?

I've got to go with the electric hand dryer on this one.  The hand dryer uses a pretty minimal amount of energy - on the order of 15 Watt-hours per use.  That's the equivalent energy of lighting a CFL for about an hour.

In comparison, not only does a paper towel require a greater use of resources (cutting down trees, turning the raw materials into paper towels), but that process requires a significant amount of energy, and then the towels need to be transported to a store, and then to the restroom.  In comparison, after installation, the electric hand dryer is ready to go.

So the hand dryer saves on raw materials, and probably on total energy use and emissions, too.

 I've gotta go with the electric hand dryer for enviro reasons, too...but I must admit that I sometimes will choose the paper towels because they're faster to use!

I think the hand dryers are best, especially because usually what happens is that I see that there aren't towels, so I just use my jeans. Now that's conservation, ha.

I have seen air dryers that use a strong blast of air, as opposed to hot air, made by an enviro company and that would be better. This isn't an easy answer, though. Things that need to be thrown away aren't generally the best idea. But with all the eco-talk in the media these days you'd think that CO2 emissions are the only important environmental subject and so the dryer would be worse.

Personally, I run my wet hands in my hair or on my pants. I suppose we could carry our own cloth towels with us so we wouldn't have to use either.