Which is more eco-friendly; electric hand dryers or hand towels?

In this article we are going to try to determine which is more eco-friendly out of paper hand towels and electric hand dryers. There are two main factors involved in this comparison. One, carbon emissions produced as a result of delivery lorry driving and electricity usage. And secondly, waste disposal of the various materials.

So which is more eco-friendly?

First of all, lets look at carbon emissions

Let’s say your hand dryer lasts 10 years before it packs up. For the sake of argument let’s say both the hand towels and the hand dryers come from the same retailer and it’s 10 miles away.

We’ll base this comparison on 100 hand dryings a day.

If you bought a standard pack of 16 Consortium C Fold Hand Towel sleeves (that’s 2944 individual hand towels), you would have to re-order once a month. That means you would have 120 deliveries over the course of ten years. The lorry or delivery van is driving ten miles each time (what actually happens is the products get sent to a local depot and a van will take the individual items to the customers, but for this example we’ll say each product is driven ten miles in total). 120 deliveries multiplied by 10 miles equals 1200 miles.

Now, a loaded lorry does approximately 8-10 miles to the gallon. We’ll give the lorries the benefit of the doubt and call it 10 miles to the gallon. In litres that’s approximately 2.2 miles to the litre.

Now, using a ratio of 2.63kg CO2 for every litre of diesel burned (see Defra for CO2 conversion tables) that makes 1434.7kg CO2.

So by choosing the hand towels route you are going to be responsible for approximately 1434.7 kg of CO2 over the course of ten years.

That does not include the CO2 produced in the hand towels production process or their part to play in your businesses waste disposal transportation associated carbon emissions. The figure is actually going to be greater than 1434.7 kg.

Now the average hand dryer (based on a quick web search) uses about 0.022 KWH energy when in use. Again using the Defra conversion tables, that’s:

0.022 x 0.206 = 0.0045.

They also use about 0.005 KWH when on standby. So 0.005 x 87360 (the number of hours in ten years) = 436.8 kg if left on standby permanently for ten years. OK, so you could half that by turning off at night, but some people don’t do that, so we’ll assume you don’t. Now let’s round that up to 500 kg to take account of the 30 seconds of usage at 0.022 KWH when the hand dryer is in use.

The end result:

Hand towels: 1435kg CO2. Hand dryers: 500kg.

By the way, we’ll look at ways in which you can reduce your carbon emissions from purchase of consumable items in future posts, so stay tuned or grab a free subscription.

Now let’s look at the materials

A hand dryer is more complex and contains more materials, but has a far longer product life. On the other hand a hand dryer is made of less eco-friendly components, so when it does eventually have to be disposed of it will not degrade for thousands of years. However an electric hand dryer that has reached the end of it’s working life is classed as WEEE (See our WEEE page to learn more about WEEE). That means that:

[r]ecoverable materials, such as iron, copper, aluminium, glass or plastic are set aside to be reused for the production of new goods.

weee-forum.org

So an electric hand dryer may in fact be more frequently re-used/recycled than hand towels are by businesses.

The problem with hand towels is three fold. First of all they are usually not recyclable because they are used to dry hands etc and are therefore considered as being too dirty to recycle, so usually they are just thrown away. Secondly they are usually not made from recycled paper, so trees are being cut down in order to produce them. Thirdly they are consumable items, meaning you have to keep producing them, shipping them and disposing of them. This all produces carbon emissions.

Even though hand dryers may contain re-usable parts hand towels are probably still better for the environment in terms of materials and disposability. Unfortunately, because they are not recycled or made from recycled paper they probably come out in second place in this example.

Conclusion

In conclusion it seems electric hand dryers are the more environmentally friendly option here.

But there is another possibly more important reason why electric hand dryers may be more eco-friendly.

It is arguably better to encourage innovation that is more sustainable in the long–term than compromise for the sake of short-term eco-friendliness.

For example, hand towels may have been more eco-friendly than electric hand dryers 30 years ago, but as hand dryer technology develops, they will become more efficient. There is an argument that by encouraging conservation of electricity we discourage innovation that leads to breakthroughs that will make the electricity we do use far more efficient and therefore more eco-friendly. However there is no argument against recycling. Filling landfills is unsustainable whichever way you look at it.

The best things we can do to be eco-friendly are reduce the amount of waste we send to landfills, improve the efficiency of our electrical technology, find new greener ways to produce electricity and recycle.

OK, the case of the hand towel versus the hand dryer seems an odd one to demonstrate this point, but think about it. Do you envisage that we’ll be drying our hands with paper, that is delivered to us by lorries, taken away by trucks and buried in the ground a 1000 years in the future? Or do you think we’ll have super-efficient electric hand dryers made from recycled components that last 20 years and produce negligible amounts of CO2 from their use?

The conslusion is simple. To be truely eco-friendly you have to be eco-friendly both in the micro long-term and the macro long-term. In the case of hand dryers versus hand towels, hand dryers are the eco-friendly option in both scenarios.

To see how electric hand dryer technology is progressing check out the Dyson hand dryer innovation.

What do you use and what do you think?

Do you use hand dryers or hand towels? Do you consider the macro long-term as well as the micro long-term? And what the hell is the macro long-term? Is it just a phrase I made up?