You can hear the hand dryers buzzing loudly on any given school day when walking by a bathroom.
But are they as clean as they claim to be?
A divide exists between whether the hand dryers are more efficient compared to paper towels, but also there’s debate about which of the two are actually cleaner.
When it comes to why maintenance staff installed these instead of paper towels, one major factor was the cleanliness of bathrooms. Students like senior Johnathan Ramirez say they believe that the staff put in air dryers “for less waste and to prevent vandalism.”
Custodian Timothy Redel confirmed this, stating that less waste of paper towels keeps the bathrooms cleaner.
“The cost of paper towels and the dispensers, when broken, were adding up,” Redel said.
From the cost efficiency standpoint as well as the paper waste standpoint, the argument is starting to lead more toward hand dryers being better on the financial end.
In addition, there are some who believe that paper towels are not eco-friendly.
“From an environmental perspective, I don’t think that there is a clear answer,” environmental science teacher Alex Stavropoulos said. “But if we were to use clean energy, I would say that the hand dryers would be better. I do know that a lot of the paper that we use here in Elk Grove is recycled paper which is definitely a step in the right direction, so there is less of that footprint, less resources are needed, but … a lot of the primary source of energy that we use in the state of Illinois is generated from the burning of fossil fuels.”
Additionally, one of the most important factors in debating which is the best item is the hygienic standpoint of it not spreading germs to your hands.
Research of the hygienic side of these products is still relatively up for debate. Loch referenced an article from the Mayo Clinic titled “The Hygienic Efficiency of Different Hand-Drying Methods: A Review of the Evidence,” in which he says there are studies about this question of cleanliness lean more toward paper towels being more hygienic than hand dryers.
“Once again that a really hard thing to control,” he said. “You have to figure out how dirty were people’s hands, how good is their hand washing techniques? There are so many variables to take into consideration that it is hard to get a true real-life study of those things.”
There is no 100 percent accurate way to compare the two products from a hygienic standpoint, but he noted that the majority of the research led to the conclusion that paper towels were more hygienic for our hands than hand dryers were.
Senior Bianca Jean Louis has never used the hand dryers after seeing a TikTok video that detailed how the dryers blow germs and “particles onto your hands and it is more effective drying them like this,” she said while shaking her hands.
With this knowledge, some students have thought up some solutions to help their preferences with their personal opinion about it. Some students really want Elk Grove to switch back to the paper towels.
“We could go back to the paper towels or we could have paper towels and hand dryers because I know some people like them,” she said. “But, I personally think that paper towels are better.”
