What impact do I have on the environment when using a paper towel to dry my hands?
Some people ponder mathematics or philosophy, but my daily thoughts are more more mundane. I am often in a situation when I use a paper towel to dry my hands after washing them (in public, definitely not at home) and ponder what impact I’m having on the world with my decision. I will now answer that question.
Let’s start with the assumption that a paper towel weighs about 2 grams.
Using this rule of thumb from the Sierra Club, we will estimate that 8 trees produce 1000 pounds of paper. In other words, 1 tree will produce 125 pounds of paper, which is equivalent to 56,699 grams of paper. We can then see that 28,350 paper towels can be produced from that one large tree.
Now, how many towels do you use in a year? Lets estimate you wash hands 3 times per day, and each time you use one paper towel. If you work 5 days a week for 48 weeks (this assumes 4 total weeks of vacation time or working from other locations with towels/hand dryers), this is 240 work days. So using 3 paper towels a day for a year required 720 paper towels. At the end of the day, about 39 people would use enough paper towel in one year to kill a tree (or one person for 39 years).
So, how do we estimate the CO2 impact for such an act such as cutting down a tree? Using pine trees as an example, at least one source states that pines can be cut after growing for 20 years. Let’s assume that these tree would live to be 200 years old if they had not been cut down, meaning that 180 years of CO2 absorption would be lost in the act of cutting down the tree. As a rough rule of thumb if we assume that a tree absorbs 50 pounds of CO2 in one year, then we cutting the tree down will effectively leave 9,000 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere that could otherwise have been absorbed.
At the end of the day, we can equate the cutting down of a tree to producing 28,350 paper towels, which creates 9,000 pounds of CO2. This equates to 0.32 pounds (144 grams) of CO2 for each paper towel used, or about 230 pounds (104 kg) of CO2 per year based on the consumption of 720 paper towels per year. The EPA estimates that driving one mile in a car produces about 411 grams of CO2, so a daily consumption of 3 paper towels per day equates to driving an extra mile in a car each day.
Granted, many assumptions were made above, and an MIT research paper calculated a much lower number for paper towel CO2 impact. Additionally, the MIT paper concluded that modern hand dryers, such as the airblade from Dyson, produces 1/3rd of the CO2 of a paper towel. However accurate this rough analysis is, I for one will now feel more informed about my daily choices.
Weekly Extreme Exception
In keeping with the environmental and global theme, this timelapse is an amazing compilation of images taken from the International Space Station (ISS). What’s striking is how ingrained a world map is in my mind, where the country boundaries clearly separate regions of different colors on a 2-D surface. However, what I notice from the perspective of the ISS are the light sources, the water/land ratio, and the distinct lack of any boundaries. Yet another perspective to ponder, especially since this one isn’t subject to projection distortion and other cartographic inaccuracies.
