Imagine for a moment you’ve just done your business in Van Hise. You step out of the stall, turn on the water, soap up, scrub your hands clean, turn the water off, turn around and use the high-powered Xelerator hand drier.
Congratulations: You’ve accomplished nothing. You touched the faucet handle after washing and rubbed your hands together under the drier, spreading both your own germs and those of everyone who touched that faucet since the last time it’d been cleaned back onto your hands.
I know we’re trying to be green, but this entire problem can be solved by one simple not-so-eco-friendly solution: a paper towel.
Proper hand washing procedure is to scrub for twenty seconds, dry your hands with towel and then turn the water off using the paper. Voila — no germs spread.
With the norovirus outbreak spreading across campus, our university needs to look at the costs and benefits of not providing towels in all of our restrooms. On one hand, we save some trees, which is extremely admirable. On the other hand, the lack of towels in the dorms causes many students not to bother washing, since the hand driers they have are inefficient and promote the spread of bacteria and viruses anyway.
There is, of course, an alternative to towels. The university could install automatic faucets, soap dispensers and hand driers in all restrooms. Perhaps this would be more cost effective in the long run. Whatever happens, something needs to be done to keep UW’s students healthy.
We need to be rational in our approach to stay green. I’m as big a screeching leftie as any of us, but if we’re sacrificing our own health for a few blue spruces, we need to reexamine our priorities. I think if you ask any student whether they’d rather have a logger fell a tree in
Let’s stay rational. Let’s stay healthy.
Tyler Junger
UW sophomore, political science