Paper towels or hand dryers: what's more eco-friendly?

The bathroom dilemma

Paper towels or hand dryers: what’s more eco-friendly?

Both hand dryers and paper towels carry an environmental cost, but if you don’t want to wipe your hands on your clothes, you’ll have to make a choice: which option will dry your hands greener?

Generally, hand dryers use fewer resources than paper towels, even though they need manufacturing, shipping and then consume electricity. Towels constantly need to be produced and transported to their bathroom destinations around the world, and even though some of them are recycled, the majority end up in landfills. Newer jet dryers are more eco-friendly, with some taking just 12 seconds to dry your hands with 30 percent less energy than old-fashioned ones, leading to fewer carbon dioxide emissions even when compared to recycled towels.

It’s not always that simple though. One study, commissioned by the European Tissue Committee, found air dryers are less hygienic than paper towels, despite their eco-credentials. Of course, paper towels are a €2.5 billion industry so there’s definite interest in keeping people using them. Another study, handily commissioned by Dyson, found newer air dryers have the lowest environmental impact, followed by paper towels, and then older-style dryers. Researchers determined this by considering the materials and energy consumption in manufacturing and transportation, the quantity of paper towels used (no-one ever dries with just one towel), the energy used by the air dryer and the energy required to dispose of the paper towels. Hand dryers are more eco-friendly since paper towels require energy with every use for their production, transportation and disposal, which air dryers do not. Even when excluding the transportation of paper towels to and from bathrooms, they’re more wasteful energy-wise than hand dryers.

There’s a fair amount of energy invested in manufacturing metal goods with mechanical parts like hand dryers, but their lifetime of between seven and ten years helps offset this initial consumption. The vast majority of a dryer’s environmental toll comes from the electricity it requires to run: 2,200 watts when in use, and 2 watts while in standby mode. The newer Dyson models claim to be at least 80 percent more efficient than the more elderly models, and this is due in part to much shorter drying times. Don’t forget, the way your local power grid generates its electricity also comes into play; a dryer powered by a solar grid will have a far smaller carbon footprint than one burning coal.

When paper towels are compared, it should come as no surprise they’re more problematic. Most paper towels begin life as trees so unless facilities are purchasing from reputable, ethical and sustainable companies, there’s deforestation to worry about. Then, we need to consider the fossil fuels spent on chopping down said trees and transporting them to the next stage: pulping. The pulping process is energy-intensive and can result in the emission of pollutants into nearby waterways—again, dependent on the company’s ethics and sustainability efforts. Then, there’s the constant to and fro of new towels to bathrooms around the world and used towels to recycling or landfill sites—the carbon footprint grows ever larger. Paper towels also come with side effects: bathrooms everywhere suffer from lazy patrons missing the rubbish bins or pulling half a towel from the dispensers—these need cleaning up and replacing, which means increased maintenance work, more cleaning chemicals in plastic bottles, more plastic gloves, and then the disposal of the bottles the chemicals came in and each and every used glove. Rubbish bins require liners—more plastic headed to landfill more frequently.

Climate Conservancy has done the maths for us: each paper towel use (assuming each person uses two towels to dry their hands) equates to 0.123 lbs of greenhouse-gas emissions. In comparison, hand dryers ranged between 0.02 and 0.088 lbs depending on wattage and drying time. Plus, the new jet-air dryers have been found to be just as hygienic as paper towels.

And what about actual towels in fancy hotel bathrooms? The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates 16 percent of water use in America can be attributed to the hotel industry; is it eco-friendly at all to use a cotton hand towel that’ll be washed after every use? The environmental impact here is harder to determine. There’s the washing powder to consider, its transportation, production and storage methods; the water consumption; the production methods of the towel itself and the potentially unsavoury working conditions associated there; the energy consumed tumble drying each towel to get it back to the fluffy hotel standard; the products and their receptacles required in cleaning the used towel bins.

If anything is clear, it’s that we need to make a conscious decision every time if we want to pick the green option. Rank jet hand dryers above paper towels, paper towels above old-school dryers, and only use fancy fluffy hand towels when you absolutely have to. Or for true eco-warrior street cred, just wipe your hands on your trousers.