Letters to the Editor
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Beatnik bob
Pee carries no diseases.
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How about the shirt.
No, I'm serious. Sometimes I think we'd be better off just wiping our hands on our shirts or waving our hands up and down to dry off our appendages.
I've actually thought about this dilemma a lot, but unless I'm at work--where I really have to follow the rules of sanitation for the sake of the public--I feel like some casual drying is OK. That is, it's not the end of the world. What I'm saying is--let's lighten up, (but just a little) about the sanitary aspect of things. I think it would be good for our collective mental health at any rate.
(By the way, Becca, this is your old friend Dan Groth. Cool to see you doing this column!)
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Facts DO matter
The only part of this opus with which I can agree is that it "sounds ridiculous"...because it is. One would assume that a journalist such as yourself would at least have SOMETHING right before writing an article for publication. Did you just make this stuff up? For starters, paper companies do indeed intentionally cut millions of trees just to make paper towels. As for carbon equivalency, you omitted the overwhelming champion. That would be water vapor, whose greenhouse effect is approximately 100 times greater than CO2. Your energy numbers are absurd. Using your hand dryer data, the power consumed is 5.75 million kwh, not 690 billion watts. This would power about 300 homes for a year, not 280,000 homes. I mean, you are off by nearly a factor of 1000...worse than even Al Gore.
Elitist morons, much like you dear, form a conclusion based on your feelings, then pick and choose "facts" to support those conclusions. This article would be an absurd bit of Socialist flotsam if the information in it were accurate. As it is, the article isn`t worth wiping my hands, or any other body part, on.
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Rob Schneider is A Carrot
As that brilliant actor Rob Scheider says after pulling out 30 paper towels while ogling Colleen Haskell's tree hugging hippie character in The Animal:
"They need one of those hand-jobby things ... I mean, blow-jobby things ... I mean hand blowers!"
Rob Scheider had it right all along. I knew he was brilliant.
By the way, in Thailand they don't even have toilet paper in the public bathrooms. They have a hose with a high pressure nozzle, which you use to spray your ass until it's clean. No Joke.
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touching the door handle
Maybe carrying a hanky is the best idea. But of the two options mentioned, I like the paper towels over the blower. And there is one reason that the article doesn't mention. When one leaves the restroom, one often has to pull open a door to exit. So, after just washing my hands I have to touch this handle that everyone else has touched -- perhaps without washing THEIR hands. My hand will be dirtier than it was before washing! I like to take the towel and use it as an oven mit, thereby keeping my hand clean. You can't do that with a hot air blower.
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I'm sorry but
Doesn't this sort of article strike anyone else as arguing over exactly how we should clean up the elephant shit in our house... when maybe what we should do is to kick out the fucking elephant?
Sorry to put it so crudely, but we need hard hitting articles about the oil industry, and how they've been suppressing alternative fuels, how they're in bed with the car makers, and what we can do about it. We need articles about our government sponsored welfare for repressive, anti-woman governments like Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, instead of more articles about the dirty filthy Jews, and the horror of plastic bags.
Sure, plastic bags may hurt the reefs, and sure, paper towels may not be as good as wiping your hands on your pants. Thing is, if we don't kick the god damn elephant out of the house, we're going to need those plastic bags and paper towels to make into rafts, because the damn ice caps are melting.
The sun beams down more energy than we could ever use every day. The earth's rotation generates an amazing amount of energy in wind. The moon supplies us with energy in the form of tides. And here we are, primitive little savages, burning crap to make energy?
Talk about missing the big picture!
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An further use for that paper towel....
Here's something further to consider: once you've dried, you have to touch that dirty door handle! At least with a paper towel, you can use yours to cover the door handle and then throw it away elsewhere.
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Wrong amount of ado about most stuff
1. This obsession with "germs." We are really *not* that delicate when it comes to little microbes. The ones that live on our hands, mostly under the nails, for an extended period and "learn" our body chemistry (that is, the ones that are more suited to us reproduce faster -- generations of microbes are very short) and then jump into our eyes, noses, and mouths when we inevitably touch our faces, *they* can cause problems, but the idea that the cooties you just now picked up from the restroom door have doomed you to a case of the flu is not borne out by research.
2. Someone said a while back that if your hands are really dirty, air dryers don't do the job. If you're relying on scraping filth off of your hands with the paper towel you use *after* you're finished with the soap-and-water phase, there's something wrong with your technique.
3. There's no good reason why we are still using wood fiber for paper towels. There are other perfectly good sources of paper fiber, but as long as there are billion-dollar chunks of capital that want to squeeze profits out of the old-growth forests they steal from future generations, you may never hear much about them, except for the usual "Reefer Madness" hysteria.
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not that big a problem
at base, the question of "waste" heat from hand driers as well as waste heat from incandescent lights, etc. ignores the fact that a large chunk of the population spends a lot of money for a big chunk of the year, trying to add heat to their homes and businesses. When calculating how much energy is actually wasted as heat from appliances, lights, etc. the fact that NO heat is wasted for much of the year in most of the US should be factored into it.