Today the towel exists, in principle, in many forms; from the most obvious applications such as sheet of paper cloth; to the most common, disposable paper cloth in commercial areas; to high tech and seemingly environmentally friendly, such as air dry towel systems; to the downright technologically exotic, such as carbon dryers that charge water molecules on your hand with 1 electronic charge, seemingly evaporating the water from your hand in an instant.

Towel technologies haven’t strayed very far from that ancient principle of—well—basically, drying. You’re drying your hand. But, recently, public health and medical professionals have produced well warranted and founded concerns regarding this principle. The first issue with drying your hand with a towel is, if it’s reusable, chances are the common towel used, whether it’s in the home or in a commercial area, such as a common restroom at a shopping mall—harbors many bacteria that enjoy the porous structure of towels. In such a case, the supposed positive effects of washing your hands, are counteracted by this one negative, in fact may produce a net negative effect, if one decides to merely wet his hands—preparing any bacteria on his hands for mobilization and transferring those bacteria from his hands to the common towel, and then to the hands of later users. This is a common issue with the towel system in commercial restrooms that merely rolls and rotates the same roll of towel around. Whenever there’s a public source of anything, be that water, a common reusable towel, etc, you’re going to have contamination issues such as that be a potential problem.

Aside from public health and medical issues with the towel dispenser model is the environmental effect. Environmentalists argue that, even with the rotating towel, the electronic hot air dryer, etc the towel is a net negative. With the electronic hot air dryer for example, the environmental savings gained from not disposing of towels is overspent on the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by energy producers such as coal power plants. Even clean energy producers such as solar farms produce more pollution by powering the hot air dryer than would be the environmental cost of disposing of a throwaway towel. The model of towel or hand drying system that environmentalist would favor would be none at all.

Environmentalists believe it’s, for the most, a needless solution that society can do without.

We have all been in the bathroom and noticed other people not bothering to wash their hands. Studies have revealed that the reason for this is predominantly that people do not have the time to stand aimlessly under blow driers waiting to dry their hands, with others not wanting to dry out their hands through using the hot air.

An excellent alternative to this is a paper towel dispenser. Economical and simple to install, a dispenser of towels can easily improve the hygiene of your organization and as such dramatically decrease the rate of sick days.

However, with such a vast range out there in the market, it is often difficult to choose exactly what your organization needs. This article serves to briefly outline the main aspects to consider when making your choice.

When choosing, pay particular attention to the following:

Material – the most durable type is a stainless steel paper towel dispenser. This not only resists inevitable knocks and bumps but also looks stylish. In addition, the smoothness of the metal means that the bacteria in the environment have no small places to hide in and thus as long as the appliance is wiped down on at least a weekly basis; it should not be a spreader of disease.

Type of towel – there are various types of towels that can be used. The three most common are rolls, c fold and multifold. Each of these has their advantages and disadvantages. A roll is generally the cheapest option, however many people find it difficult to pull off the paper at the perforation and thus leave ragged ends or pull off too much. This makes the roll hang loose and susceptible to germs etc. as well as looking unsightly. A c – fold consists of individual papers that you pull out one at a time. However, they are quite thin and as such; people tend to need more than one piece. Multifold are the most expensive option, yet due to their thickness only one is used by the majority of the public. Security – although not a natural consideration, it is important nonetheless to choose a piece that is lockable and if in a high use area, then vandal resistant. Since the piece will be in an area that is not under surveillance, there are always a few people who will take this opportunity to destroy.

Overall, a stainless steel paper towel dispenser not only encourages your workers to wash, which is good on an individual level, at a corporate level frequent washing equals good health and thus better productivity for you, so go ahead and investigate today.

You can buy a key by itself if you lose yours, but most dispensers will come equipped with one. If you buy all of your dispensers from the same place, chances are they will all use the same key. Then you can carry just that one key around if you ever need to use it.

Dispenser keys look a bit like normal keys, but they are made of plastic or a thin sheet of metal. They are not anywhere near as thick as a traditional door key, and they usually do not have as complex of a notch pattern on them. You may have a key that is simply a zigzag pattern, or you may have one that actually looks like a key would for a diary or something similar. It just depends on the make of dispenser you use.

To use the paper towel key, you will either need to match the pattern of the grooves and just push it own, or you will need to push it in and turn it like a normal key. Again, it depends on the model of dispenser you are using. You should have little issues with your key, unless you do not match it to the grooves correctly. You will notice that early on though.

You can get these keys very affordably if you ever need a spare or a replacement. For less than a dollar in most cases, you can have a brand new key to access your towel dispenser. These cannot be copied because of the way they are made, so you will need to order one form some sort of store.

It is always wise to have a few keys around, especially if you have many dispensers out there. You can give a few keys to your janitors, and the rest you can keep somewhere that they can be easily accessed. If you trust your employees, you may just have the key on a hook next to the dispenser itself to save some trouble. That is up to you.

The type of dispenser used for these towel products can be important as well. A company wants a dispenser that will provide easy to access toweling for their employees and customers. You can now have this same beneficial item for use in your own home. The Enmotion paper towel dispenser from Georgia-Pacific offers the best in personal hygiene equipment. These state of the art devices are designed to be hands free dispensers so you never even have to touch the unit. They incorporate a small motion-detecting device that automatically dispenses your towel when movement is made.

This is a great unit for homes with children. The safe use of the product will reduce the risk of cross contamination between children who might be sick. The cool automatic feature also appeals to a child’s sense of wonder so it will be much easier to get them to wash their hands when they know they can make the machine disperse a towel for them almost by magic. The automatic feature also reduces the waste of having extra towels pull out of a unit then is actually required. This occurrence happens frequently with standard units you need to pull your towels out of.

These products are also very easy to care for because the interior has a rubber seal, which keeps any moisture out of the main unit. There is no need to remove towels from inside the device in order to clean it, because they always stay dry and sanitary. You simply wash or wipe off the exterior of the unit to maintain its clean condition. When used in a commercial business setting the unit can be sprayed with a high velocity hose with water up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are looking for a safe and convenient way to dispense paper toweling, this unit will fit your needs.

Most c fold dispensers can be hung right on the wall, just like any other dispensers. These units are slimmer than others are though because they do not have to accommodate for a large roll of paper towels. If you are tight on space, this change in width can make a big difference for you. It also makes the paper towels less of an eye sore so people can actually focus on the decorations you have in the room.

A stack of paper towels for a c fold dispenser will cost just the same amount of money as a roll, depending on how much you need. You can store these stacks a lot easier than the rolls because of how compact they are. If you get a chance to buy them in bulk, you do not have to worry about having trouble storing them. All you have to do is stack them side by side, and you can fit a ton of towels in a very small space. Then you just have to pull them out when you need to.

You can get locking paper towel dispensers that will help keep your stacks in place. You can also look into different designs of dispensers to see which ones will look best in your space. Some of them have a metal surrounding, while others are comprised of opaque plastic. Do some comparisons online to see what you like the best. The prices should not vary too greatly, and you may be able to save some money by buying several dispensers at once.

Whether you have a new bathroom in need of paper towels or you are just anticipating messes in the office, a c fold unit could be perfect for you. It is convenient, affordable, and readily purchased online. Check out your options when you can.

We have all seen people not bothering to wash their hands after using the toilet. Research has found that the reason for this is twofold, with men in particular reporting that they have not got the time to waste standing under a hot air dryer, whilst women are concerned about drying out their hands.

An excellent way to combat these two main complaints is to install a paper towel dispenser in your bathrooms.

However, with a multitude of dispensers for paper towels in the market, it is difficult to wind your way around. This article serves to briefly guide you through the process of choosing your dispenser, finding a piece that suits your own specific business needs.

When choosing an appliance, the following need to be considered:

Material – dispensers come in a wide variety of materials, with the two most popular being stainless steel and chrome. Both are strong and thus resistant to knocks and bumps, with chrome having the advantage of coming in a variety of colors.

Type of towel – there are three main types of paper towels; the roll, the c fold and the multifold. Although the cheapest of the three, it is difficult to pull off the towel in a roll and thus small pieces of paper can end up on the floor, making your bathroom look messy and unhygienic. C- Folds consist of a single paper with double thickness at both sides. Although workable, there is a certain thinness and more than one paper may need be needed. A multifold has the disadvantage of being the most expensive option however as a general rule only one paper is needed, although as the roll, can at times be difficult to pull out.

Manual or motion – To eliminate the difficulty of pulling out the paper, a motion sensor dispenser can be used. This enables a certain amount of paper to be dispensed whenever anyone activates the sensor button, making it a more economical way of using paper.

Overall, commercial paper towel dispensers are an economical choice, providing your bathrooms with not only a hygienic way to wash, but enabling you as a business to optimize your employees health, which must surely be good for you as well as them.

Today in institutions as health- and medical- centric as hospitals, public health agencies, and medical foundations, the automatic towel dispenser type is indispensable. The automated process eliminates many of the variables for contamination, and from the user’s perspective and experience, the entire process seems and feels to be as sterile as can be.

Above and beyond the health and medical benefits, there is the actual time savings that is achieved by this. Automatic dispensers such as the touchless system dispense an equal length of paper towel, at the same speed, for everybody. What’s eliminated, often—and of particular interest to extremely high traffic restrooms—is the varying towel supplies used at the dispenser, since the length and time it takes to dispense is commoditized and standardized—i.e. no more waiting in line for the one person that decides to hog all the towels.

There are the systems’ detractors however. Most critics of the system argue that folks who want a lot of towels, can stand in front of the dispenser for however long the person wishes. While this is true, it’s easier to argue with such a person, with a simple statement of: you’ve had your sheet, please let the line continue. Yet another critique of the system is that contamination is still a very real prospect. Critics cite a statistic that most contaminated towels are contaminated before or at the time the dispenser is loaded, which means, users don’t have anything to do with it, and that the contamination benefit is actually a non issue.

Further, environmentalists argue that towels are hardly necessary to begin with. It’s an oft cited statistic by this side of the debate, that most towels that are used in the United States originated and are manufactured in China. The narrative argument along this line is that one should imagine all of that freight and cargo ship oil used; used to ship what? Towels? A product that’s used for no more than a couple of seconds, and then tossed into a waste bin of other products that won’t be recycled; won’t be reused; won’t be synthesized into another material: it’s almost pure waste.

In the 1950s, mass production was a method well exploited: from production lines for military development, to management styles that enforced strict adherence to mass production ideals in the corporate and private sectors. This, anthropologists and historical economists say, can be read from such products as the bobrick dispenser. The idea of the dispenser differs from the roll. The idea invokes digitization (plies and sheets of paper, instead of one organic roll) for the sake of efficiency, mass distribution for the sake of a centralized control store (the paper roll model). Instead of bulky large rolls of paper, located at central locations, the bobrick was desirable to commercial space managers because the small stores of paper towel can be placed in various places throughout the area. The design of the dispenser, which hung close the wall, meant that it could be placed in tight areas, whereas the larger roll dispenser could not.

The dispenser was all about efficiency. To load, you just dropped a stack of sheets into the bottom, and pull the bottom sheet out from the bottom lip of the dispenser, halfway; this would start a chain reaction that would pull the next sheet or couple of plies, one after the other.

Although the dispenser was popularized and brought to mass market in the United States, its history is the stuff of urban legend and myth. Furthermore, today, tragically some might say, many of these dispensers aren’t even manufactured in the States anymore. They’re manufactured off-shore by manufacturing havens such as China and other Southeast Asian countries.

The dispenser type, today, is ubiquitous and even some home owners prefer this model. They’re found in gas station restrooms. They’re found on the side of gasoline pumps. They’re found in hospitals. An iconic and popular CEO is said to keep a dispenser at his suite office. The bottom line about the dispenser is this: it’s cheap; it does what it claims to do (dispense towels); and it gives the user an experience of, or the illusion of, a clean and sterile method for drying your hands or receiving a material with which to wipe up a spill or clean a window.

The Georgia style dispenser is popular for its ability to keep and maintain moisture in a varying set of situations: varying temperatures and humidity providing lots of locations in which to place these dispensers. Often, the Georgia is used by health and medical facilities, because the dispenser is able to hold and sustain antiseptic and sterilization liquids that particular supplies come moistened with. Perhaps you’ve also noticed such a dispenser in the restroom at your workplace, or at your school – they are fairly common.

The dispenser and the supplies are a bit more expensive that plain vanilla dispensers and paper towels, often because the towel supplies are often treated with a particular sterilization or antiseptic solution. So you will be less likely to find one of these higher end dispensers at say, an airport restroom, which is considered a top high traffic restroom type as far as industrial and commercial restrooms go. It may also be uncommon or extraordinary to find such a dispenser in a shopping mall restroom. However, if you need a so called baby wipe sort of towel—the sort that this dispenser often dispenses—you might try the special need/physically or vertically challenged/baby changing room at the shopping mall—the larger single user restrooms, often close to the traditional and typical male and female restrooms – it will likely be a Georgia Pacific.

The dispenser is particularly useful in infant rearing institutions such as specialty care facilities that take care of new babies for working moms. The dispensers are also popular amongst the tech sector, namely the manufacturing sector, where clean rooms are often adjacent to computing workstation rooms, and cleanliness is still an issue.

It’s important to note that the dispenser isn’t a commodity sort of dispenser (like the old fashioned roll dispenser), but is proprietary. This adds to the price tag for the user or institutional buyer and is one of the main reasons the device claims less of the towel dispensing market than other types of dispensers. The dispenser is considered high quality and a specialty item. When traditionally cost conscience entities such as Wal-Mart carry such dispensers, it’s looked at and considered a so called luxury.

Health and medical professional rave about the dispenser. It is scientifically proven to have less of a chance of containing contaminated towel stores and supplies than other dispenser types, mainly because over 94% of these dispensers’ towel stores are of the sort that are moistened with a sterilizing and antiseptic solution.

The bidet principle is in fact a lot more hygienic that a simple toilet ply to wipe off your bottom. In fact, it’s common for adventurous Westerner backpacking types to visit a country such as India, and experience the bidet principle, and to become a so called convert. When accompanied with dabs of soap, the bidet method is in fact more hygienic than a simple ply of toilet tissue.

The toilet dispenser in developing economies is considered, especially in Southeast Asian developing economies, to be a luxury. It isn’t uncommon for restrooms in shopping malls or even hotels in countries such as Thailand, the Philippines, or Malaysia to charge a nominal fee for a few plies of toilet tissue. The toilet tissue dispenser in this case would be an actual person that dispenses the toilet paper, who also receives the fee for the product and service.

A common criticism of the bidet method is probably obvious to most: it’s being wet at the end of the toilet ordeal. How are you supposed to dry off if there are no toilet tissues around? Those in economically poorer areas and situations simply choose to remain wet and to let the underwear absorb the moisture, to let the underwear dry the person off.

Those that haven’t yet experienced the bidet principle is likely wondering how one gets over to the bidet. Or, how one maneuvers about the toilet seat in order to splash some water on their bottom. If the idea of anything other than a ply of tissue paper is foreign to you, you’re likely going to have a hard time figuring out how this is done. As a Westerner convert myself, I could tell you this much: you’ve just got to try it a few times. Like anything else, I like to say, like finding a niche with red wine varietals, you just have to try it, over and over again. Eventually, you get a style about it, and you civilize the whole ordeal into a procedure. Personally speaking, I prefer a combination. I agree with the argument that the bidet principle is cleaner than just using toilet tissue, but the drying is definitely an issue, which is where I believe the toilet tissue comes into play.