Comment by maddyboo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maddyboo | Hacker News Reader

Hand dryers need to die.

Their primary benefit is lower cost of operation for the facility, but other than that, their environmental impact is at best marginally better than paper towels, and worst is their hygienic aspect.

Various studies have found up to a two-fold increase in bacteria count on users' hands, as well as a risk of contaminating the surrounding area with bacteria blown off of the user's skin:

"In 2009 a published study was conducted by the University of Westminster to compare the levels of hygiene offered by paper towels, warm air hand dryers and the more modern jet-air hand dryers. It found that after washing and drying hands with the warm air dryer, the total number of bacteria was found to increase on average on the finger pads by 194% and on the palms by 254%; drying with the jet air dryer resulted in an increase on average of the total number of bacteria on the finger pads by 42% and on the palms by 15%; and after washing and drying hands with a paper towel, the total number of bacteria was reduced on average on the finger pads by up to 76% and on the palms by up to 77%." [1]

The noise aspect discussed in this article is yet another reason air dryers need to die. I hadn't even considered the effect they might have on kid's ears, and I'd imagine most adults probably haven't thought about it either. I find them positively annoying, but having your ears at the same height as these monstrosities must be horrible.

Kudos to Miss Keegan for her wonderful research!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_dryer

> Various studies have found up to a two-fold increase in bacteria count on users' hands,

I take issue with the nature of that statistic.

What does a 'two-fold increase' actually mean? Is it two hundred bacteria, instead of one hundred, when pre-hand-wash, I have millions?

Is it double the bacteria after use, compared to before use? If so, how many bacteria do I even have, after washing my hands?

What is the quantifiable harm of this 'double'? Double times 'next to nothing' is still 'next to nothing'.

(I despise hand-dryers, but I also take issue with these sorts of claims.)

Not that I want extra bacteria, but I wonder how significant that increase is practically, or what the baseline is. I'll sometimes shake a dozen peoples' hands in a row if I'm at a party, or hold onto public transport rails... Can it be much worse than that?

Well, one of the reasons for washing and drying ones hands is to reduce the amount of bacteria exposure. I don't have the same expectation when shaking a dozen peoples' hands at a party.

It’s to reduce specific types of bad bacteria that you might have contaminated yourself with when you went to the toilet.

I don’t think anyone can expect that washing your hands will eliminate all bacteria- including those in the air.

That said, I still hate hand dryers and still refuse to use them.

I don't know enough to be informed but I'm naturally skeptical about this idea that germs == bad. Maybe a washroom is an autoimmune proving ground for my body.

I think what might help is some better sense about what the pros and cons are to exposure. Are there some germ sources you want to avoid while others you can probably be fine with? Should my kid really wash his hands after visiting a playground?

At the moment all I see is that germs are lumped into one category and treated as a quantity to eradicate 99.9% of with lysol.

Or put simply, why should any of the numbers in your comment be seen as a bad thing?

I don't know if the numbers are a bad thing or not, but when making evolutionary arguments, consider that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, humans would have been regularly exposed to germs from a much smaller number of humans than modern humans are in a crowded city (and that small group would mostly have been exposed to germs from each other, not strangers with access to modern transport).

My intuition tells me that exposure to all the germs is bad, but exposure to none of the germs is bad too. I think there's some sort of healthy middle. I feel let down by the various actors that fail to help find and promote wherever that middle is.

I want a resource that says, "okay so bathrooms have very dangerous bacteria because of feces. But your playground will generally be fine for a little autoimmune exercise. Go let your kid get a cold or two." My physician just hummed and hawed about this. And parenting resources are full of people freaking out over sanitizing everything.

I’m personally against over-sanitization and think exposure to a moderate amount of ‘germs’, especially during developmental years, is healthy. However, a public restroom isn’t really the place I want to get my daily dose. I’m definitely no infectious disease expert, but traces of excrement and grime from hundreds of strangers definitely sounds like something I’d like to avoid.

Probiotic foods and exposure to my family’s germs, on the other hand, I am okay with.

Regardless of the research, I think what’s not discussed is how the choices around these devices are typically made by a single owner of a business. As the population continues to increase, and people generally become more educated and these types of experiences have more value, how could we come up with either solutions to the core issue, or solutions to give more funds to a business owner who would gladly install a better solution if those funds were available?

Taking a sample of a hundred random people, especially in a larger city, their values (however ranked) are wildly different, yet one person likely made the decision on the dryer, dependent still on the strengths of the local paper (janitorial supplies) company’s salesperson.

Currently, there isn’t a micro donation or registry (wedding registry) type framework where people can influence these decisions. Something similar could be in store?

Even Kickstarter, while it allows popular ideas to move forward, doesn’t allow these types of decisions to be influenced.

Micro donations? I think this is implemented by the legislature in the building code. If you’d like to run a restaurant, you must have restrooms with N urinals and M stalls per space of occupancy. Each restroom must contain K sinks per facility. You must provide drying apparatus.

Once the towel-squeezers were legal; now they’re not. Dyson next.

I agree with you. That’s why I mentioned solving it at the core first or creating a new type of framework that enabled influencing these decisions at a local level, if the former (your point) fails.

I’d also like to point out that the hostility on choice and applicable laws still fallback to a single Jill or Jack, when 100k people may end up using their bathroom. It’s the current reality, laws don’t exist at this detail, except for extremes.

If your question is how to fix negative externalities, the answer is "regulation".

Otherwise... you can't make people care about every little thing in their lives. Sure we can solve this hand dryer problem with an awareness campaign or microdonations or whatever. But what do we do for the other hundred thousand issues like this?

Nobody has that much attention to spare on non crucial things. That's why we elect people to make these decisions for us.

Many things are going to suck as long as our elections remain broken. That is a much harder problem to fix, but there is no way around it.

Unregulated markets, no matter how innovative, do not always produce perfect outcomes. Basic conditions for and solutions to market failure have been known for more than a hundred years. It's not rocket science.

> marginally better than paper towels

Of which you need only one to dry your hands:

https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_smith_how_to_use_a_paper_towel

There are tons of hand dryers in hospitals. Completely self-defeating, facepalm-worthy infrastructure.

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