The new School of International Service building has been touted as one of
the “greenest,” LEED-certified building in the District of Columbia, in sync with American University’s commitment to sustainability and good global citizenship.
The building is visually impressive, and does incorporate numerous eco-friendly initiatives including solar panels on the roof, great use of natural light in the atrium, non-toxic building materials (take that McKinley!), and fixtures to reduce water use.
However, this AWOL blogger noticed something a bit ironic. While the men’s restroom does contain an environmentally friendly state-of-the-art water-less urinal (sorry for the level of detail), there are no electric hand-dryers, only paper towels.
Last time I was in there, the trashcan was literally overflowing with paper towels. Come to think of it, most of the facilities around campus seem to favor wasteful paper towels to hand dryers.
Now, I’m no expert, but according to treehugger.com, paper towels are worse for the environment than electric hand dryers when measured by almost any metric. All things considered, paper towels have a much larger carbon footprint, and have twice the global warning impact as hand dryers.
Personally, I’m a fan of shaking off the hands and letting your jeans do the rest, but if you must, hand dryers are nicer to nature than paper towels. It’s great to have a gold-certified LEED building on campus, but either LEED is not so green, or AU shirked on the contract. I presume the latter.
I’m going to give AU the benefit of the doubt and assume they chose paper towels over dryers for hygiene reasons. Paper towels are supposed to get the dirt off your hands better. We don’t want an epidemic.
As far as I’ve read, it’s soap that tackles the dirt and bacteria, and the motion of rubbing your hands together under running water that gets rid of most viruses. If there’s still dirt on your hands when it’s time to dry off, you might want to try saying the alphabet backwards before removing your hands from the sink. And as far as hand-drying methods, Steve’s is personally endorsed by Dennis Kucinich as well as yours truly. But if a machine must be used, let’s get some of these: http://www.dysonairblade.com/homepage.asp .
This is a absolutely great read. I have had a job in the green energy industry for just over 6 years and it is amazing how rapid the industry is changing. For most of us this is a absolutely exciting period of history so let’s make sure keep up the pace.
Has anyone ever used an electric hand-dryer without ultimately just wiping their hands on their pants?
I agree, it’s interesting, probably tomorrow …