Should you use hand driers or paper towels?

The battle of what to use when drying your hands can lead to a muddy mess. You may find yourself getting pushed to make a choice based on how the methods are environmentally friendly, speed of drying, degree of dryness, effective removal of bacteria, and prevention of cross-contamination. Read on to see the evaluation so as to help you gauge which method you should ultimately settle for.

Environmental friendliness

Paper towels are made from recycled paper. However, they are not able to be recycled further after use. They are actually stuffed with a lot of chemicals so as to make them hard and water absorbent. However, when you visit a washroom, you may spot the full bin that has not been emptied for days, which is not environmentally friendly. On the other hand, the driers do not involve any tree cutting. Much as this could be a sale point of the hand drier companies, they use more electricity not to forget the noise pollution. If you have visited a library or church lately that has a hand drier installed, it can be a great nuisance with many of them getting quite overwhelmingly loud when under use.

Speed of drying

Hand driers may make you think that they dry your hands faster. However, paper towels actually do. It takes you only ten seconds to use a paper towel while a hand drier could take up to thirty seconds. As you wait for the jet air sensor to detect your hand, start off and blow air or suck the moisture away, more seconds are being spent. After all, no need of making queues when using paper towels unlike when you are all waiting for the drier. Instead of wiping your hand using your sweater or jeans, if in a hurry, go for the paper towels.

Degree of dryness

Experts tell us that it is easier to spread and get bacteria when you have wet hands, hence we are encouraged to clean and dry them immediately. When you evaluate using a hand drier over a paper towel, you will realize that they work the same in this drying aspect. However, it also depends on your level of patience. If using ten seconds in each method, the paper towel may give you better results in comparison to the hot air hand drier which will offer less drying for the same period.

Effective removal of bacteria

This is the elephant in the room. With a lot of research around this, the most profound one involved a University student who put a petri dish in a hand drier and left it for some hours then went and left the specimen to culture, only for it to grow a lot of multiplying bacteria. This is not meant to scare you.  Both the paper towel and hand driers do dry but it is claimed so far that paper towels remove more bacteria. This is because the hand driers suck in the air which could have bacteria that was not removed well during the cleaning stage and the next person may get these germs.

Effect of cross contamination

If you are hygienically conscious, it goes without saying that hot air dryers are unsuitable for use in critical care areas because they may contribute to cross-infection either via airborne dissemination or via contaminated personnel.

If told to choose therefore, what do you go by? From a hygiene stand point, paper towels, though expensive as they need constant replacement, are better for use. All in all, ensure that you have dry hands so as to avoid bacterial build up after washing your hands.

With paper, you didn’t have to wait restlessly for half a minute for the dryer to finish its bloviation. You didn’t have to fear a malfunction: no air at all, or infernally hot air, or even an explosion of the kind that pours flames