Thank goodness Peel District School Board trustees put an inane proposal to take a step backward in time by replacing hand-dryers in washrooms with paper towel dispensers into the garbage, where it belongs.
Talk about your regressive proposal.
What kind of example would it have set for students, had the board endorsed a recommendation from its health and safety committee to rip out the mechanical washers and go back to paper products? How were they planning to explain to students that they would be contributing to the more-rapid depletion of our forests?
At their next student environmental summit at the H.J.A. Brown Centre, were they going to ask the environment clubs to do the installations?
The recommendation may have been well-intended, but it just doesn’t pass muster.
There are studies indicating that air drying doesn’t work as well as hand-wiping in getting rid of germs, in large part because people don’t completely dry their hands. With the potential threat of a flu pandemic, or the latest outbreak of an unknown SARS-like virus, some health officials are proselytizing for paper in washrooms again.
Brampton Trustee Steve Kavanaugh, who has some background in this area from his professional life, was positively insistent that paper is the way to go for improved hygiene.
When I bounced the notion off Rohit Mehta, a 16-year-old student at John Fraser Secondary and the chair of the Peel Environmental Youth Alliance, he was astounded that the idea was even broached.
“Hand dryers are the best thing that’s happened to school washrooms,” he said. “They should have signs in the washrooms, like they do at the ROM, that show you how to wash your hands properly, how to clean between your fingers.
“If they teach us in school how to prepare for a bombing and how to prepare for an evacuation, they can teach us how to wash our hands,” said Mehta, who’s going into Grade 12. “I’m guessing that 80 per cent of kids don’t wash their hands anyway.”
And therein lies the rub, or the non-rub in this case.
It’s not what kind of equipment you have to wash and dry your hands, it’s that you understand its importance and that you do it properly.
If we really have an issue with the effectiveness of hand dryers, let’s try the infrared paper dispensers like the ones used in places where hygiene is critical, such as hospitals, before we decimate another few hundred acres of forest.
One more indisputable argument Mehta makes about wasting nearly $800,000 on paper towel crankers: “There are tons of other areas where it could be spent better.”