This year, Emerson Junior-Senior High School has made many positive changes to our community such as the use of student IDs, more school trips, etc. However, there has been one change that has had a not-so-positive impact: the abolishment of paper towels in ALL school bathrooms.

Although paper towels may be troublesome at times, with students causing them to overflow the garbage can, or custodians having to repeatedly refill the dispenser or pick soggy paper towels up off of the ground, this new change has become a hassle for many students. 

Take this as an example. When we spill food or drinks in a classroom, there are no longer any paper towels available for us to clean the mess up ourselves. When a classroom runs out of tissues, we can no longer go to the bathroom to use a paper towel instead. Everything has become much more difficult. 

Although the hand dryers may seem environmentally friendly and easier to maintain, they are not as clean as we originally thought. It has been proven that hand dryers actually cause more germs and bacteria to grow in bathrooms. 

A study at Harvard University decided to test the cleanliness of hand dryers by exposing Petri dishes to the air flowing from the machines and checking for bacteria growth. It was discovered that “the Petri dishes exposed to hot air from a bathroom hand dryer for 30 seconds grew up to 254 colonies of bacteria” (“The Bacterial Horror of Hot-Air Hand Dryers”). 

Meaning, the hand dyers actually spray loads of built-up bacteria onto your freshly-cleaned hands. How sanitary is this? 

There may be downsides to both of these methods, but I firmly believe that paper towels are superior to newly-installed hand dryers which is something many students tend to agree with. 

That’s a lot to absorb, right?