Ever seen that addition to the instructions on a hot-air hand dryer?
“4. Wipe hands on pants.”
Perhaps people use towels because they don’t want to get their pants wet.
I’m reminded of a Dilbert cartoon where Wally “proves” that he doesn’t have to wash his towels - when he dries himself, he’s the cleanest object in his house. The towels should be getting cleaner every time he uses them. 
Here’s my 2 cents. I’m not entirely American, having been born in England, but I have lived here almost all my life. I also consider myself a moderate environmentalist – I ride the bus and recycle when possible, but am far from the extremes.
Here’s what’s most relevant to the air dryer vs. paper towels debate as far as I’m concerned: I’m a (British) engineer’s daughter. The paper towels work better.
When I use a dryer, one of three things happen: my hands are still damp, so I push the button again; my hands are still damp so I follow the above noted step 4 and “wipe hands on shirt”; my hands are dry before the dryer stops, so I walk off feeling vaguely wasteful.
As for low-flow toilets, they are nice in theory, but in practice I find I usually have to flush twice for solids. Since each flush uses a little less than half the water of a regular toilet, I’m using more water for the same job.
Oh, but so much fun to try, and the looks you get from the other guys…
While I’m sure the issue of drying one’s hands is a major environmental concern, I would think that there are much more pressing issues.
What about the love affair with SUV’s? Or the willingness to drill for oil in wilderness areas? (Ala Bush’s plan to remove toxic oil from our national parks.) Or the complete disregard for the future of the planet shown by our rejection of the Kyoto protocol? Or the fact that CAFE standards for fuel efficiency have not risen in 20 years?
Yes, americans are anti-environmental. This can be seen in much more dramatic fashion, though, than in our use of paper in bathrooms.
themoon wrote:
The toxicity of the oil isn’t an environmental factor at all, so long as the oil stays in barrels and pipelines.
And it is now possible to set up oil drilling stations that have almost no surface footprint. The caribou might get driven out by an oil-drilling platform the size of a small city, but they’re not going to much care about an oil-drilling platform the size of a small house.
kimstu and themoon have it right. What is important to do is to find out which decisions we make as consumers have the biggest environmental impact and concentrate on those. The book that kimstu references is an excellent source in this regard. And, its basic conclusions are that what you should sweat are the big things—your choice of transportation is number 1, along with where you need to commute to. Other important issues are your house and major appliances. Other than that, there are a number of smaller players that are nonetheless high-impact (like powerboats and snowmobiles).
But you shouldn’t waste your time stressing about paper vs. plastic bags, cloth vs. disposable diapers, or (I am willing to bet) paper towels vs. electric hand dryers. For one thing, it is hard to even determine which choice is environmentally-friendlier in each case and for another these are fairly small players in the grand scheme of things at any rate.
The best summary of The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices is expressed in a quote on the back cover by Denis Hayes, the originator of Earth Day, who says “too many people drive their Land Rovers to the grocery store and think that ‘paper or plastic’ is a meaningful choice.” So, no, Americans are not anti-environmentalist because they use paper towels, but they do demonstrate a reckless disregard for the environment in their choice of transportation, partly because we as a society have chosen to effectively subsidize people to waste energy…Basically, SUV owners get welfare from the rest of us. And all of us (even those who do not receive net “welfare payments” in this regard) have a tendency to overuse our cars because of this subsidization.
I probably should have phrased this as “where you live relative to where you need to commute to”, or more simply, to what extent you rely on your automobile.
jshore wrote:
Huh? How are my tax dollars benefitting SUV owners?
Sorry, that was a (bad) joke.
Well, it’s not so much your tax dollars as your lungs, the rest of your body (if you happen to get side-impacted by one, e.g.), etc. Besides direct form of subsidization of our transportation, there is simply a lot of costs not being borne by the individual SUV consumers, i.e., there are lots of externalities. For references in this direction, see http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/articles/subsidies.asp
“Welfare” does not have to be a direct transfer of tax monies to be welfare!
Just for the record: I first dry my hands with paper towels and then finish them off with the hot air. Then I’ll take a couple paper towels, crumple them in my hands and throw them in the waste. This is just to irritate any ecofiles who may be watching me. That’ll teach them to mind their own business in the peeroom.
themoon wrote:
Ah. 
I’d forgotten about that old Onion article.
I still don’t see drilling for oil in a “wilderness” area as a bad thing, particularly if they use one of those newfangled small-footprint oil drilling platforms. The potential ecological disruption, even in the event of a worst-case disaster scenario, is far less than the ecological damage caused by your average “clear-cutting” logging company.
You’re comparing apples and oranges here, because you’re not including the bigger waste of electricty on the hand dry side- its manufacture. Mining ores, using electricty to form its components…can’t be less energy use than harvesting trees and making paper. Not to mention that hand dryers aren’t some how sent to their location by telekinesis, so they’re wasting energy for transportation too. It may have less cost to the environment since there are less of them, but I don’t think the total energy that goes into the production and use of them makes it all that much better, if at all.
elfkin477 wrote:
A hand dryer has to be manufactured and transported to its site once, where it will be used many many times.
Paper towels also have to be manufactured and transported to their site once, but they will only be used once.
Obviously. Why else would I have concluded by saying “It may have less cost to the environment since there are less of them, but I don’t think the total energy that goes into the production and use of them makes it all that much better, if at all,” if not to show my comprehension of that fact?
The point, however, is that it though there are fewer of them, they are each the equivalent energy use-wise, when fairly comparing the manufacture of both products, of many many paper towels.
Ah. When you said:
I thought you meant:
“It may have less cost to the environment since there are less bathrooms with air hand dryers than there are bathrooms with paper towels”.
If you’re really that concerned about the environment, how about just shaking your hands back and forth for the same amount of time that the drier would be on? It would save the electricity and work just as well. Some more envrionmentally-friendly tips:
Instead of turning the radio on, just imagine the songs. Sing them yourself in your head.
Even recycling takes energy. So next time you want to buy some soda, don’t get in a can. Just carry it around in your hands.
One of the biggest areas of energy uses is transportation. Instead of using an inefficient gasoline engine, just put your car in neutral and push.
You mean pushing your butt, and rubbing your hands under your arm, is more sanitary than a paper towel? I’ll take the towel, thank you.
Cute. And sometimes I do worry that overkill about worrying about trivial environmental issues drives people to this opposite point-of-view of, “It’s silly [or hopeless] to do anything so I will just keep driving to the grocery store down the block in my Ford Excursion everytime I need a quart of milk.”
It’s not silly, nor hopeless, and it is extremely important. But, please choose what you do to have the most impact instead of debating the relative merits of paper towels and hot-air hand dryers! As a rough estimate of the issues involved, think about how much the paper towels that you use weigh and then recognize that a gallon of gas weighs about 8 pounds (and gets converted into about 25 pounds of CO2 in combustion). [Yes, the weight of the resources is only a very rough measure of environmental impact but it is often not too bad an approximation as long as one isn’t talking about particularly toxic stuff.]