Do Paper Towels win ‘Hands Down’?

What wins your vote in the washroom?

When liaising with you as clients, we know many of you use paper towels, but some have electric hand dryers. We wanted to dig a bit deeper into which hand drying method is preferred and more beneficial in the work place.

Having looked at which was better for hand hygiene, we realised that this is and has been a ‘hot debate’ for a number of years. There’s a growing body of research, including studies in the Uk and world wide on this subject since 1989.


Last year the press and the NHS reported on this subject and concluded that paper towels not only dry hands quicker than hand dryers, but they’re also more hygienic.
We’ve previously discussed good hand washing techniques, but biomedical scientists say the effectiveness of this is lost if hands are not dried properly, as wet hands pass on more germs than dry ones.

Paper towels were found to dry hands in 15 seconds, where dryers took 45seconds, researchers highlighted that when using an electric hand dryer, bacteria are blown into the atmosphere and on to the person drying their hands, but hand towels were superior, as they remove bacteria effectively and caused less contamination of the washroom environment. It seems clear that hand towels reduce the risk of cross contamination & dry hands more effectively.

We were careful to note that many of the studies were not carried out or funded by paper towel manufacturers, which reduced the bias.

We also realise that as business operators you maybe concerned about the impact on the environment with usage of paper products, the studies were unclear on how much more this impacted the environment, versus the electricity used by hand dryers.

Here at Cleaning Technique we have a range of power towels from £15.66 (2688)box and recycled hand towels from £14.95 (2400 )box. Please contact us if you would like a free