By Elijah Cabatic, Staff Writer

The school removed the paper towels around the end of last year from the primary student bathrooms around center court, and students aren’t happy. The school bathrooms don’t have the best reputation among students. It is clear that the school has the same problems that most schools have when it comes to bathrooms. They struggle to keep it clean enough for students to feel comfortable using them, and with this move, the school has only made the bathrooms worse than they were before.
I personally have had many poor experiences with the bathrooms. For example, two years ago I tried to use the bathrooms in center court only to find all of the toilets covered in a red liquid I later learned was Kool-Aid. The removal of paper towels from the bathrooms makes them much less effective at their purpose. According to a poll I conducted on Mills students, 69.2% of them said they preferred paper towels over hand dryers, which are currently the only way to dry your hands in the bathroom. This is only supported by the fact that the remaining 30.8% of people didn’t prefer the hand dryers but rather didn’t have a preference either way. When asked for opinions, many Mills students wrote of concerns about germs being spread by the hand dryers and them now not being able to clean up any messes that may be made in the school.
To be clear, hand dryers can be very effective hand-drying devices, just not the ones at Mills. The ASI Turbo-Dri installed in the Mills bathrooms is by no means the worst I have ever used and does have a HEPA filter, which, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, theoretically should remove about 99.97% of contaminants, including dust, bacteria, and mold, but they’re also not on the same level as the top-rated Dyson and Xlerator units which are popular in many large commercial establishments. Those have much stronger air jets that dry your hands more effectively. It is clear from our data that students prefer paper towels over the hand dryers, so why were they removed?
To figure out the reason for their removal I talked to the Dean of Students, Tim Christian. When I asked him why paper towels were removed from the bathrooms, he gave me two main reasons: cost-cutting and student waste. Regarding the cost-cutting he said, “the paper towels were removed for probably cost saving measure, and using the hand dryer was in a combination of trying to keep it probably economically more feasible,” As for the other reason, student waste he said, “kids were mistreating it, so the mess that was created from all the paper towels indiscriminately discarded all around the bathroom made it no longer tenable.”
The cost-cutting angle seems reasonable. I did some rough math on how much it costs to run a hand dryer vs. the cost of paper towels. According to Mitsubishi Electric, a typical hand dryer uses 0.013 Kilowatt Hours (the sum of energy a constant charge of one kilowatt would equal after one hour) per 30 seconds of usage. Considering PG&E’s rate of 46.6 cents per Kilowatt Hour, the total cost for a 30-second hand dry is 0.6 cents, which is compared to the three cents it costs for your average foot of paper towel. The 2.4 cents difference doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you assume that those bathrooms get 600 uses a week (half of the student body), which, based on the poll I conducted, seems like a reasonable estimate, that is a weekly saving of $15.60. Over a whole school year (36 weeks), that equals $561.60, or the price of an M2 iPad Air. This is pretty rudimentary math, but it shows that there are real cost savings to be had by using exclusively hand dryers.
The second reason is far less theoretical. From my limited usage of the bathrooms over my tenure at Mills, I experienced what Dean Christian was talking about when it came to the bathrooms. I’d often see paper towels all over the floors, stuffed in the sink, or overflowing from the trash can. I can’t help but agree with his assessment that we were mistreating it. Aside from the cost saving, I imagine it saves the janitorial staff a lot of time and effort in cleaning the bathrooms since they don’t have to clear the sinks, empty the trash cans, or pick up any paper towels improperly disposed of by Mills students.
So, after all of this, we are at an impasse. On the one hand, it is clear that students, including me, prefer paper towels over the hand dryers that we are now forced to use. On the other hand, hand dryers do function as hand drying devices and if we aren’t responsible enough as students of this school to take care of the bathrooms and make them clean and tidy for our fellow students, then do we really deserve that privilege of using them?