do i dry my hands or use a paper towel?

Here’s a dilemma solved for you…I’ve often wondered whether it’s more environmentally sound to dry my hands with a dryer or paper towels in public loos. spaceball do i dry my hands or use a paper towel?Because, of course, we all wash our hands when visiting the toot, don’t we!

hand-dryers

Quelle quandary! Well, turns out, someone thought so. Climate Conservancy, a US emission counting nonprofit group recently came up with this:

* one paper towel amounts to the equivalent of one ounce of greenhouse gases (I’ve left these in US metrics on purpose), which is equivalent to driving 1/16th of  a mile in an average car

*  a standard dryer accounts for less than half an ounce. Hello!

* BUT, before you get too sure about life, hand towels are mostly made from recycled timber. Not so great.

* Oh, and paper towels remove 58 per cent of bacteria from one’s hands, while dryers increase the number by 255 per cent. Because the dryers suck up germs and then spew them back out, and people don’t spend the necessary time under the heat to kill the germs.

The only solution? Wipe your hands on your bum.

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