Hand dryer or paper towels? This is a simple question, yet one that most businesses and even homeowners often find themselves unable to answer. So, if you are currently in that dilemma, you can take relief in knowing you are not alone. You can also rest easy because below, we compare the excel hand dryer against paper towel to see which suits your business best.
- Hygiene
You want to offer your clients nothing but the best. This means that other than keeping your restrooms clean at all times, you also want to ensure that the entire rest-room using process is hygienic.
The good news is that both paper towels and hand dryers are hygienic. However, high-speed fast-drying dryers are more hygienic as they dry the user’s hands more thoroughly and faster than paper towels do. Also, they are usually automatic, so the user doesn’t need to touch anything that would be harboring bacteria.
- Sustainability
If one of your core values as a business owner is to ensure your business remains as eco-friendly as it possibly can, then you are better off getting a hand dryer. Why? Well, paper towels, as you may know, are made from paper. This means that for every pack of paper towel that makes its way to your restroom, a tree somewhere was cut down. To be precise, for every ton of paper towels produced, 174 full-grown trees are often cut down.
Also, the production process is incredibly wasteful as it involves the burning of oil and gasoline during manufacture and transportation. This means that every pack of paper towels used in your restrooms leaves behind a significant carbon footprint. With an excel hand dryer, on the other hand, no trees are cut, and neither is the manufacturing process wasteful.
- Cost
The sole aim of starting and running a business is to gain profits and to expand it. To achieve this, you must offer the best products and services possible, and keep operational costs as low as possible to achieve economies of scale.
That said, buying paper towels would seem like a more sensible option because they often cost less. In reality, they cost more than you would expect! For instance, even though the cost varies depending on factors such as size, quality, and brand, the monthly average cost of paper towels used by most businesses is usually $75. Add in the costs of maintenance — for instance, you will require trash bags to store the used paper towels and pay someone to take out the trash as well as replenish the supply when they run out. This means that the overall costs of using paper towels become even higher.
A quality high-speed hand dryer, on the other hand, offers your clients not only convenience but is also energy effective. It uses almost 80% less energy than a traditional dryer and dries hands in 10-15 seconds. Therefore, it uses less power and doesn’t dent your energy bill. Moreover, no staff is needed to continually put up new paper towels or take out the trash bag.
In essence, it’s convenient both for you and the clients. Paper towels might seem like the easy, go-to option when starting a business, but they will bite you in the back in the long run. Dryers, on the other hand, for instance, the excel hand dryer, will require you to spend a little more on the initial purchase than you would have spent on paper towels, but the benefits you and your clients enjoy in the end are nothing but immense.
Image Credits: Oluwaseun Duncan
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