Regularly washing your hands helps to minimise the spread of bacteria and disease, keeping you and others safe. While people understand the importance of hand washing, hand drying is often overlooked.
Let’s look at some different hand drying techniques and their effectiveness at ensuring dry, hygienic hands.
Shaking hands dry
If you’re in a rush or there’s nothing else available, it might be tempting to give your hands a quick shake and let nature do the rest.
While it seems like a hygienic method, as there’s no need to touch anything to dry them, it’s actually not. Hands take quite a long-time to air dry, meaning that you’ll leave the restroom with wet hands.
Germs and bacteria are transferred more easily to wet hands than dry ones, so your freshly washed hands won’t stay clean for long.
Paper towels
Paper towels are quick and easy to use, but they can harbour the bacteria that they pick up from wet hands.
If all the paper towels are placed into a sealed bin, this shouldn’t pose much of a hygiene issue, but public toilets are often strewn with used paper towels and overflowing bins. When someone cleans them up, they risk contamination.
Paper towels are fairly hygienic for the user, but they are wasteful and can spread germs to others.
Washable towels
Sometimes, you’ll see a washable hand towel or reusable rolling cloth in a public toilet.
These options are quick to use and can be washed for reuse to prevent waste. However, they are rarely washed as regularly as required, instead storing bacteria and passing it on to the next person to use them.
Small hand towels that are used once and then disposed of in a sealed laundry bin are a better option in terms of hygiene, but this requires a large supply of towels and lots of laundry.
Hand dryers
Modern hand dryers offer a very effective method of hand drying, especially high-speed models that dry hands in a matter of seconds.
They help to evaporate the water from hands, reaching into each nook and cranny with powerful hot air to make sure hands are dry all over. While some research has concluded that hand dryers blow bacteria around the environment, these studies are often funded by the paper towel industry and may be biased.
What’s important is ensuring that hands are dried properly after washing, and high-power hand dryers make this quick and easy.
Effective hand drying with Tekflo®
Tekflo®’s range of hand dryers has something for all applications, allowing you to ensure that all visitors to your facilities leave with perfectly dry, hygienic hands.
Read our FAQs for more information about our hand dryers, or speak to a member of the team.
