Which is more eco-friendly,electric hand dryers or hand towels?

In this article we are going to try to determine which is more eco-friendly out of paper hand towels and electric hand dryers. There are two main factors involved in this comparison. One, carbon emissions produced as a result of delivery lorry driving and electricity usage. And secondly, waste disposal of the various materials.Let's say your hand dryer lasts 10 years before it packs up. For the sake of argument let's say both the hand towels and the hand dryers come from the same retailer and it's 10 miles away.
We'll base this comparison on 100 hand dryings a day.If you bought a standard pack of 16 Consortium C Fold Hand Towel sleeves (that's 2944 individual hand towels), you would have to re-order once a month. That means you would have 120 deliveries over the course of ten years. The lorry or delivery van is driving ten miles each time (what actually happens is the products get sent to a local depot and a van will take the individual items to the customers, but for this example we'll say each product is driven ten miles in total). 120 deliveries multiplied by 10 miles equals 1200 miles.
Now, a loaded lorry does approximately 8-10 miles to the gallon. We'll give the lorries the benefit of the doubt and call it 10 miles to the gallon. In litres that's approximately 2.2 miles to the litre.So by choosing the hand towels route you are going to be responsible for approximately 1434.7 kg of CO2 over the course of ten years.That does not include the CO2 produced in the hand towels production process or their part to play in your businesses waste disposal transportation associated carbon emissions. The figure is actually going to be greater than 1434.7 kg.
Now the average hand dryer (based on a quick web search) uses about 0.022 KWH energy when in use. Again using the Defra conversion tables, that's:They also use about 0.005 KWH when on standby. So 0.005 x 87360 (the number of hours in ten years) = 436.8 kg if left on standby permanently for ten years. OK, so you could half that by turning off at night, but some people don't do that, so we'll assume you don't. Now let's round that up to 500 kg to take account of the 30 seconds of usage at 0.022 KWH when the hand dryer is in use.A hand dryer is more complex and contains more materials, but has a far longer product life. On the other hand a hand dryer is made of less eco-friendly components, so when it does eventually have to be disposed of it will not degrade for thousands of years.