AIBU to ask that hand driers are banned.

[BathshebaKnickerStickers]

I work as a TA with children who have ASC.

Every child with ASC In our school HATES/is scared of/is anxious about hand driers.

We have various toilets in the school where they are switched off permanently.

Thinking about it, surely one of the most obvious and simple thing that any organisation/business can do is to remove hand driers.

Surely using recycled paper towels, with enough bins, and onward recycling is better for the environment too.

Companies like Sainsbury’s and Morrison’s who do “low impact hours” once or twice a week could very quickly become more “low impact” 24 hours a day simply by removing all the hand driers.

Some of the put your hands inside ones are really unhygienic.

They are constantly wet from the water blown off hands into them, and when they blow again all the germs living in the warm dampness get blown back onto your hands. Nasty stuff like listeria.

I know this 100% - we had a trial one at work which we swabbed to see if it was safe (food premesis). It was absolutely teeming.

I don’t use them either, anyone who hasn’t washed their hands thoroughly has the water and germs from their hands blown back around the machine or down the wall. I realise it may be an overreaction, but if I was to accidentally touch the inside I’d have to start the whole process again, they’re grim.

they basically blew toilet germs onto your hands

People have become obsessive about cleanliness in a not helpful way. Unless you have a compromised immune system, the body is quite capable of dealing with stuff that's floating around in the atmosphere - agonising about "toilet germs" is ridiculous. Nothing horrendous is going to happen from 10 seconds of warm air on your hands ffs.

I think they suck up germs, give them a nice moist warm environment to breed and then blow them onto your hands, that’s what my ex colleague told me.

My DC hated them - DS still does.
My main bugbear is they don’t bloody work. Hands are still damp afterwards. A paper towel is much more effective

Waiting for my daughter to be assessed for asd and she really like hand dryers. In certain places like a decision can be made as whether to have them. Removing them from everywhere is Unreasonable.

I agree. They are useless anyway except for the Dyson ones. I'd much rather have paper towels. It is possible to make them out of recycled paper.

The Dyson ones are the best but they are also the loudest...!

The worse are the ones in disabled toilets where the area is so small you can’t help but set it off with your bum while trying to wriggle child in and out of their chair. Therefore triggering a meltdown to add to the fun and games!

Nah. Less waste. Less environmental impact. Less mess. More hygenic for staff to clean up after.

This

but are powered by electric so do have environmental impact.

i

You're being ridiculous.

but are powered by electric so do have environmental impact

Nothing like the impact of paper towels, though. Towels have to manufactured (gallons of water plus the electricity), most are pointlessly bleached, then they are shipped. After use, they have to be taken away again and usually go into landfill.

Sorry, OP. I agree it would be good to switch them off during 'low-impact' times but, the rest of the time, I think banning them would be nuts.

The difficulty is that, by providing paper towels, they provide people in any public toilet the means to block the toilets, the sinks, to leave them laying around on the floor and, as with the big roller things places used to have, something to set fire to.

It costs thousands to get a firm in to follow a blockage down the sewers and remove hundreds of paper towels, hundreds to redecorate where somebody has blocked the sinks, left the taps running and flooded the toilet and the room underneath, thousands if not discovered immediately/done repeatedly and the resulting water damage causes plasterwork to fall off, ceiling tiles to collapse, fungus to grow out the walls, lighting to be rendered unsafe and expensive equipment in the rooms below to be soaked.

I've worked somewhere that suffered exactly that on a regular basis. Every mainstream school suffers it. Pub toilets suffer it, shopping centre toilets suffer it. Even when topping up my income from fulltime work by cleaning a local council's office, I had to regularly remove huge bundles of blue paper from toilets, sinks and the floors of toilets that the public had absolutely no access to.

If other people could be relied upon not to vandalise, act like idiots or treat areas that somebody else has to clean up as an open invitation to be as disrespectful and inconsiderate as physically possible, then we could ban hand driers. But we can't.

I hate them. Kids hate them

Yeah we have this. Both my girls (NT) are terrified of hand dryers. One of them will only use public toilets that don’t have them or we need to use a baby change so that we can control it.

Last week she was sobbing in a public toilet because she was scared and a woman switched it on anyway. Very deliberately. Arsehole.

They are also scared of the hoover it’s massively inconvenient

not going to use a hand dryer ever again

It is becoming quite common for large international companies to remove hand towels and only have hand dryers on environmental (and lets face it, also cost) grounds. I appreciate this isn’t the same as schools but if you add this plus the blockages because neither adults nor kids apparently can be trusted not to put paper towels down the toilet, and I can see why they don’t.

@Processedpea

If you put a face flannel in your bag, it's the perfect size to dry your hands and take it home. It doesn't take up much room in the washing machine. So, is environmentally friendly and really cheap.

i am definitely going to do this! thanks blackcat :)

I was going to say similar to MitziK so won't repeat it!

One of my lasting memories as a child of school/public toilets with hand towels was of blocked toilets from idiots putting hand towels down them, of going to get a towel and there being none, of seeing people taking handfuls of the things and being too young/quiet to ask why they were stealing them. I wondered how much extra money was spent on paying people to unblock the toilets and on stolen hand towels, believe me it happened! (Also pens, paper, other stationery etc.) As a child I hated going to dry my hands only to find no towels, had to use my clothes to dry them on, but got used to it.

I also don't particularly like using hand dryers, but got used to them too. Sometimes I just don't want to dry my hands using them so use my trouser legs, but at least I have the choice rather than having no option if there are no paper towels.

I also have can aspie ds. He has always hated hand dryers (and Hoover's etc) so have always had to work around that, other three children not keen either. When he was a young child it was more difficult to wait for a quiet time in the toilets as he couldn't hold it for long, I spent many hand washing times trying to cover his ears with my hands if anyone used the hand dryers and trying to get his hands dry on my trousers too. Having another baby meant we used baby change or accessible toilets a lot so that made it easier, or there were generally muslin squares etc in the changing bag he could use.

I used to clean a small primary school and there were were both hand dryers and paper towels in some of the toilets. I was surprised at how often the hand dryers were used - nearly empty bins and not needing to refill hand towel dispensers, plenty of water marks on the dryer/wall under the dryer. I used to wipe the dryer over and clean the wall every day, then do a deep clean every so often. Unfortunately I couldn't clean the inside of the dryer though. But also had to unblock the odd toilet because someone had put hand towels down them. Imagine in a large secondary school how many toilets could end up with paper towels down them? I shudder to think. My high school had hand towels, I pity the cleaning staff, as yes, i saw towels in toilets there sometimes too.

You are right that in an environment like your workplace there is no need for hand dryers, but they should not be banned. It is up to the individuals making the decisions about these things to take their staff's opinions and users needs into account and decide what should be used.

But if anyone can come up with a new alternative to hand dryers then please do, especially the ones that I start when my bum passes under them like a PP.

YABU. Like a PP said, less waste and more hygenic. It's ludicrous to suggest we make a universal ban on something because some people are scared of it. By that logic we'd have to ban literally everything anyone was scared of. Dogs, planes, spiders, buttons.... Everything.

YABU to want a complete ban everywhere. More children are scared of dogs, for example. There may be a case for some schools, and maybe for 'quiet hours' in supermarkets, but not universally.

How do we balance all the different needs? So people who can't tolerate the noise vs environmental concerns vs cost reasons (i.e. the problems of vandalism with paper towels that have been mentioned)? I don't have the answer, I don't even know if there is one.

We don't balance the needs. Society does not accommodate autistic people and it will never truly do so.

Look at this thread, it was only a random kind thought by the OP with no actual basis for changing anything, and it's been waved off as ridiculous and unreasonable in no uncertain terms.

If anything, the older I get, the worse it seems to get - more 24/7 noise and loudness and connectivity and demands of being sociable.

I think it must have been so much easier for autistic people even forty or fifty years ago. No wonder so many older people are being diagnosed later in life these days.