I was in a public washroom a few days ago and while I was drying my hands at the electric hand-dryer, noticed this little unctuous plaque from the managment, congratulating themselves on installing modern hand-dryers, rather than foricing the customers to use paper towels, with all the bad environmental consequences of clear-cutting, land-fills, etc.
Now, we had a major fight in this area a while ago about the power company building a huge dam, to provide it with water for it’s new coal-fired electical generating plant, and all the environmentalists were themselves fired up about it, going to court to try to stop the dam from being built.
So, is it better to dam rivers and burn coal, or cut down trees and make disposable paper hand towels?
::: shaking water off hands and blowing on them :::
On the other hand, there is a modicum of truth to the claim.
The paper towels are also going to consume a fair amount of electricity to produce at the paper mill (after the gasoline and diesel fuel has been expended to get the tree to fall down and wander into the paper mill and before the diesel fuel and gasoline has been expended to get the paper towels to saunter out into the world looking for a dispenser to fill and before more gasoline and diesel fuel has been expended to cart it out to a landfill, somewhere).
(There is energy expended in the manufacture and installation of the dryer, of course, but it tends to be a one-time expenditure that does not need replacement for from 5 to 15 years whereas new paper towels are needed daily.)
Is the advertising hype? Sure. It has a good chance of being true, as well. How true (i.e., what is the actual environmental cost comparison between the two methods) I doubt that many (if any) people have measured.
Well, we could go back to those cloth things on rollers, and just never wash them. No recurring costs, and after a while nobody will even WANT to use them, producing even more economies by reducing wear and tear on the mechanism …