Wisconsin Company’s Bathroom Lab Answers All-Important Question

A restroom isn’t always considered a science laboratory — OK, maybe it is in low-brow humor — but at Georgia-Pacific Corp. in Green Bay, Wisconsin, what happens in the bathroom helps determine what will happen in a lot of other bathrooms. Recently, the 1,500 employees of the pulp and paper company delivered their verdict: Paper towels beat blowers, ahem, hands down.

The products the workers test, including different types of toilet paper, paper towel and soap dispensers, come from the Georgia-Pacific Innovation Institute at Neenah, Wisconsin, where new ways to reduce supply chain costs, increase the shelf life of products and drive sustainability improvements are researched and developed.

The consensus that paper towels are better than dryers matches the conclusion reached by scientists at London’s University of Westminster in 2015, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Milwaukee Patch, or click here to find your local Wisconsin Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

For that study, researchers used paper towels, a textile roller towel, a warm air dryer and a jet air dryer to determine the most hygienic methods of hand-drying. If hands are contaminated, as they often are before hand-washing, the jet air dryers sent the contaminates into the air at both far and near distances, including into the faces of little tykes standing near their parents as they dry their hands.

While the high-powered dryers sent 59.5 colonies of yeast, the test agent, flying through their air, paper towels were considerably more innocuous, spreading only about 2.2 yeast colonies and none of them very far.

Lead researcher Keith Redway said the results favoring single-use paper towels address an important public health concern.

“Cross contamination in public washrooms is a legitimate public health concern,” he said in a news release on the University of Westminster’s website. “The extent to which jet air dryers disperse microbes into the washroom environment is likely to have implications for policy guidance to facilities managers operating in a wide range of environments from sports venues and airports through to schools and hospitals.”

Not only that, paper towels dry hands faster and friction dislodges bacteria, leaving hands cleaner, Theresa Lash-Ritter, an urgent care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said in a recent article about the research.

“We often say that hand washing is the key to preventing the spread of illness,” Lash-Ritter said. “But wet hands increase the risk of transmitting bacteria, so drying is an equally important step in prevention.”

That’s not pulp fiction for Wisconsin’s all-important paper industry, where about 30,000 people have jobs in paper mills.

The Green Bay workers haven’t weighed in on the all-consuming over-under debate about toilet paper — though, anecdotally, if you have house cats, it’s best to let the paper flow from the back, rather than the front of the roll, which makes it easier for felines to shred, which they love to do when they’re either bored or, more likely, exercising their natural urges to hunt, tear up and rip apart their prey. That’s a discussion better left to animal behaviorists, and they’re not on staff at the Innovation Institute.

“I am not going to answer that question,” Justin Oliphant, director of engineering at the Innovation Institute, told the Journal Sentinel.

Photo by jar [o] via Flickr Commons