It’s the age-old question that continues to baffle many of us in the bathroom: when you come to drying your hands, should you reach for the paper towel, or the electric dryer?

For some, this decision might be related to hygiene, and for others, drying performance. For many, environmental concerns are also an important consideration, no doubt motivated by the fact that our daily activities contribute to the complex web of growing sustainability pressures facing the planet.

So how might we decide which of the two most common methods of drying our hands – paper towel or an electric dryer – is the most effective, and environmentally friendly, without resorting to the convenient wipe on the trousers?

Life cycle analysis is a method long used to identify life-cycle environmental impacts of products and services, including materials, manufacturing, transport, use, and end of life (e.g. disposal).

Using this analysis, we can search out ‘hot spots’ – those parts of the life cycle which have higher impacts – to identify the most important aspects for our analysis.

The heat on hand dryers …

So let’s cut to the chase: what are the hot spots for the most common hand drying systems?

Life-cycle research consistently shows that the environmental impacts of the electricity and towels used at the point when we dry our hands dwarf the impacts throughout the rest of the life cycle. These include the materials, manufacturing, and disposal of hand-dryers and towel dispensers.

This is because we use dryers and dispensers many times before they are replaced. But every time we dry our hands we consume resources, either paper or electricity.

The environmental impact of hand drying is therefore most significantly affected by how much and what type of paper towel we use, or how much energy is consumed by the electric hand dryer.

Research comparing these two methods of drying concluded that both the conventional hand dryer and the paper towel performed roughly the same, environmentally speaking.

Each method, however, gained a small advantage over the other depending on changes to critical factors such as:

• weight and number of paper towels used per dry (the average is two)
• proportion of recycled paper
• power rating and length of time for drying using an electric dryer
• other regional electricity impacts

So in some contexts a paper towel is the slightly better option, and in others, the conventional electrical hand dryer. This depends largely on how the electricity is generated, and how the towels are produced and disposed of.

The new ‘high performance’ contenders

You might have noticed a proliferation of fancy new dryers in bathrooms in recent years. While conventional dryers use a combination of warmth and air flow to evaporate and blow water off your hands, these newer dryers use a non-heated rapid air stream to simply strip the water off. Do they make the grade?

Several recent studies independently peer reviewed by experts, such as this one, this one from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and this one I conducted in 2011, have compared several high speed dryers to paper towels and conventional electrical hand dryers.

At first glance, the two high-speed dryers investigated – namely, the XLERATOR and Dyson Airblade – already have an advantage over conventional electric dryers. They have a much shorter drying time (between 12 and 20 seconds, compared with 20-40 seconds for conventional dryers) and a lower power rating (around 1.5 kilowatts, compared with 2.4kW).

The studies mentioned above have confirmed this advantage, even when potentially lower-energy consumption by the conventional dryer is considered.

The researchers also compared the impacts associated with generating and using electricity for the dryer with the impacts and emissions related to paper production, manufacturing, and disposal.

And again the high-speed dryers came out on top. This result held even when fewer than two towels per dry were used, and when the paper was 100% recycled, both in manufacturing and disposal.

Overall, these life-cycle studies found that using a high-speed dryer reduced environmental impacts markedly. This included global warming potential, land use, water use, solid waste, ecosystem quality, and embodied energy, when compared with conventional dryers and paper towels.

Which is the greenest of them all?

It seems a compelling argument can be made that, when faced with the choice, we should reach for the high-speed electrical dryer over the conventional dryer, and even the humble paper towel.

As electrical grids become less greenhouse intensive the environmental benefits of high-speed electrical dryers over paper towels may even increase.

However, this trend could change in the future: towels may become lighter and smaller; social marketing campaigns may highlight how towels can be better used and reused; new technologies may surpass the benefits of high-speed drying.

Regardless, the key point here is that products, such as those for hand drying, should be considered within the broader context in which they occur; that is, across the entire life cycle from cradle to grave.

Only once we take into account the whole system can we make informed decisions that can secure better environmental outcomes, now and into the future.

And at least we can now feel a little less anxious the next time we’re faced with this hand-wringing dilemma.

Simon Lockrey is Research Fellow at RMIT University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

Roll badger culls out across the country, with far fewer criteria to control the gunmen – that’s what Liz Truss wants.

The Environment Secretary’s statement to Parliament on the 2015 badger culls in Somerset, Gloucester and Dorset – made just as MPs were about to go home for their Christmas jollifications – would have been laughable if it wasn’t such a dire repeat of the previous two years’ misinformation and bad science.

She cites the Chief Veterinary Officer as saying that “industry-led badger control” – a chilling term – will achieve disease control benefits. She says the government’s approach to dealing with bTB has worked in other countries.

It hasn’t. The only country that has seriously culled its badger population is Ireland, and the facts from there are very dodgy.

The one welcome announcement was that they are finally going to introduce statutory post-movement testing for cattle, something many farmers have been crying out for. But even that only goes so far.

An unsubstantiated claim by Truss

Answering MPs’ questions , Truss claimed that more than half of England (the Low Risk Area) will officially bTB free by 2020, but ignored the fact that:

• Scotland has been officially bTB free for quite some years, without culling badgers.
• Wales took the decision in 2009 NOT to cull badgers but to have strict bio-security measures, cattle movement controls and annual testing for all cattle. This has almost halved their cattle slaughter rate and they are on the way to becoming bTB free without killing badgers.
• The Low Risk northern and eastern regions, although they currently have little bTB, have also not benefited from annual testing and tighter cattle movement controls. The incidence of TB is rising.

Asked by Labour MP David Hanson how many of the thousands of killed badgers had been tested for bTB, she first blamed Labour for creating the problem of bTB and then said,

“I am following the advice of the Chief Veterinary Officer, who says that culling is an important part of dealing with it. Why do Labour Members not congratulate the hard-working farmers in Somerset, Gloucestershire and Dorset who have delivered this year, and who are helping us to deal with this terrible disease?”

Untested badgers were not mentioned (bar one in the first year of culling, none have been tested).

Neil Parrish, the pro-culling Devon Tory MP said: “In Gloucestershire and Somerset, there has been a very beneficial reduction in the number of cattle suffering from TB in the badger culling areas.” He then asked, “When will the Secretary of State be able to release the figures that will show what is happening?”

Maybe when the moon turns blue, because if there genuinely were figures to suport his statement Liz Truss would have been touting them around every media outlet she could find.

Let’s use some facts

Truss claims that the badger culls in Somerset and Gloucester (their third year of culling) and Dorset (experiencing its first) have been successful. What does that mean? Successful in killing lots of badgers? Or successful in lowering the incidence of bovine TB among cattle?

The culls are being carried out in very small areas of each county (Somerset approx. 4% of the total land mass, Gloucester approx. 7% and Dorset approx. 8%). One really cannot claim that culling badgers in such a small%age of land is affecting the TB rates enough to be counted as ‘successful’.

Defra’s own statistics show that annual testing of cattle and other bTB control measures in Dorset was reducing TB without culling. And there is evidence, slight it is true, that perturbation of badger populations in Somerset has resulted in new incidents of bTB around the edge of the culling area.

This evidence comes from a website that maps bTB outbreaks in England for the last 5 years. It is worth noting that according to this map there was a total of 9-10 farms in the North Dorset culling area that had bTB breakdowns in 2015, only three of which were still under restrictions at the time of the badger cull. Compared to the spread of incidents in parts of Devon and Cornwall, this looks pretty sparse, and makes one wonder just why Dorset was allowed to have a cull.

The NFU was not happy when campaigners found and used this site. But it is factual, unlike claims based on hearsay rather than figures.

In 2014 the then Environment Secretary Owen Paterson was foolish enough to repeat to a farming journalist, as fact, something a Gloucester farmer had claimed; that since badger culling had started there had been a huge increase in ground-nesting birds (dead badgers don’t eat birds, and it’s not a staple food for live ones). This was news to the RSPB and embarrassing for Defra when they were queried about it.

This is, if course, a ‘science-led’ control of badgers

These culls are no longer pretending to be ‘pilot badger culls’, due to run for four years before being rolled out across the country. Until they are completed there can be no properly assessed scientific evidence that culling badgers will result in less bTB. To have any roll-out without that evidence is utterly unscientific. Nor is it bovine TB control. It is just ‘badger control’.

Defra launched a consultation on 28 August 2015 on their plans to ‘update’ the criteria for culling even more badgers. The 2015 culls started just three days later, on the August Bank Holiday.

They solicited responses by emailing over 300 ‘interested parties’. Others had to find out for themselves, which meant that some badger groups only had a few days to send in their responses before the month-long consultation closed.

There were 1378 responses, 90% of them from the public. Farmers and farming organisations accounted for just 3%. The fact that the 2010 consultation on badger culling elicited over 59,000 responses demonstrates how unpublicised government consultations can be, particularly when they don’t want to hear the answers.

Three proposals were offered:

1. The length of the culls should not be limited to the current 6 weeks;
2. Allowing culling in a much smaller area (100 sq.km rather than the current 200 sq.km plus);
3. Providing more flexibility (or ‘anything goes’) for licensing of new areas of culling.

Having dismissed those who were against badger culling in principle (“many responses appeared to have been submitted in response to campaigns … “), it must have been clear to Defra what the majority opinion was:

All three proposals could increase the perturbation of badger populations, leading to increases of TB in cattle (as proved by the Randomised Badger Culling Trials). All three proposals were moving away from the criteria set by the RBCT – a legitimate argument seeing that the government relied heavily on the RBCT to justify culling badgers, while happily misquoting its findings.

There were also worries on welfare issues and the possibility that local populations could be wiped out. Of the several hundred responses to each question, only 40-46 people broadly supported the proposals mostly, judging from the reasons given, because they would hamper those trying to protect badgers.

To all of which Defra replied that the responses “have helped inform the Secretary of State’s decision to implement the proposals”, which is a horrifying prospect for England’s badgers. It will almost amount to badgers being shot wherever and whenever the gunmen choose.

And, seeing that the government has refused to release the true costs of culling badgers, it will cost unknown sums in policing. On only one thing have they given way – they have apparently agreed to test culled badgers for bovine TB.

And what will they do if it is found that too few badgers have bTB? Apart from staying very, very silent. Or make use of that statement (attributed to Truss) about failing defences in last month’s disastrous floods:

“Our defences worked really well right up to the point at which they failed.”

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer who writes for The Ecologist and other media on the badger cull and other environmental topics.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘So badger culls are working? Liz Truss, produce your evidence!‘ by Oliver Tickell.

Efforts to speed carbon cuts pledged under the Paris climate deal will require a fast, mass mobilisation of low carbon technology at costs that can be competitive with coal, a task to which nuclear power will likely be unsuited.

So says a new version of the World Nuclear Energy Industry Status Report, which tracks developments in the sector and provides outlooks based on developments energy and climate policy.

Time is the main enemy of the world nuclear industry, says Mycle Schneider, the author of the report which had its abridged version published in Beijing.

“Everyone needs to speed up energy transition, and cheap quick technology is going to be the first choice”, he said, pointing to figures in the report which indicate that 70% of the 60 or so reactors currently worldwide are delayed. Five of these have been listed as ‘under construction’ for over 30 years.

The 40 reactor units built between 2005 and July 2015 had an average construction time of 9.4 years, suggesting that a fast-roll of the technology in future decades is highly unlikely. In China, where 18 units under construction, the average construction time is faster at 5.7 years.

And as nuclear power has already suffered three major accidents (Three Mile Island in the US, Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, and Fukushima in Japan), higher safety demands raise standards for construction and operation, ensuring that the majority of postponements or cancellations of nuclear power plants were due to excessive costs, Schneider adds.

Nuclear share of power generation on a long term decline

Meanwhile, wind and solar power are being rolled out at a much faster pace. Between the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and 2014, growth in solar and wind capacity outstripped that in nuclear power. Nuclear power peaked in terms of share of energy production in 1996, at 17.6%, falling to 10.8% in 2014.

Even in China, which is bucking the trend by persisting with plans for nuclear power, the outlook for build-out is looking increasingly uncertain, as nuclear power faces both high costs and fierce competition from other energy sources in the electricity sector.

Wang Yinan, a researcher at the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is opposed to large-scale development of nuclear power, believing the risks involved are too great. The latest technology, known as Generation III+, is unproven in practice, with none of these new reactors yet in operation.

To compound the problem, regulatory staff and engineers are not yet up to speed with the new technology, raising concerns about safety.

As Schneider puts it, those capabilities take time to build up – it’s not just a matter of taking a training course in nuclear power. And in a country as densely populated as China, an accident could be catastrophic.

Nuclear target – 58GW by 2020 – unlikely to be achieved

A frenzy of construction in new coal-fired power stations and a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, has placed China’s with an electricity market in surplus. But China has approved new reactors in all of the last six years, with the exception of 2011 when a moratorium was placed after the Fukushima disaster.

National Development and Reform Commission plans would see China reach 58 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power generating capacity by 2020. However as only 51 GW of capacity is already in operation or under construction, it is very unlikely this target will be reached, given that length of time it takes to build new nuclear.

However some think that on current trends at least, nuclear power is essential. Lan Ziyong, chief engineer for the China Nuclear Energy Association is one. He outlines two reasons why it is needed. “First, to meet our emissions commitments; second because wind and solar power are not stable enough.”

The future will depend on whether or not technology can keep up with the trends. Yang Fuqiang, Senior Adviser on Climate, Energy and Environment for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that it would be feasible for nuclear power to provide 10%-12% of China’s energy, up from the current 3%.

“If there are new breakthroughs in nuclear technology and current safety concerns are resolved, nuclear power may yet have a longer lifespan”, Yang points out.

Zhang Chun is an editor in China Dialogue‘s Beijing office.

This article was originally published by China Dialogue under a Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License and 2.5 China License.

Efforts to speed carbon cuts pledged under the Paris climate deal will require a fast, mass mobilisation of low carbon technology at costs that can be competitive with coal, a task to which nuclear power will likely be unsuited.

So says a new version of the World Nuclear Energy Industry Status Report, which tracks developments in the sector and provides outlooks based on developments energy and climate policy.

Time is the main enemy of the world nuclear industry, says Mycle Schneider, the author of the report which had its abridged version published in Beijing.

“Everyone needs to speed up energy transition, and cheap quick technology is going to be the first choice”, he said, pointing to figures in the report which indicate that 70% of the 60 or so reactors currently worldwide are delayed. Five of these have been listed as ‘under construction’ for over 30 years.

The 40 reactor units built between 2005 and July 2015 had an average construction time of 9.4 years, suggesting that a fast-roll of the technology in future decades is highly unlikely. In China, where 18 units under construction, the average construction time is faster at 5.7 years.

And as nuclear power has already suffered three major accidents (Three Mile Island in the US, Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, and Fukushima in Japan), higher safety demands raise standards for construction and operation, ensuring that the majority of postponements or cancellations of nuclear power plants were due to excessive costs, Schneider adds.

Nuclear share of power generation on a long term decline

Meanwhile, wind and solar power are being rolled out at a much faster pace. Between the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and 2014, growth in solar and wind capacity outstripped that in nuclear power. Nuclear power peaked in terms of share of energy production in 1996, at 17.6%, falling to 10.8% in 2014.

Even in China, which is bucking the trend by persisting with plans for nuclear power, the outlook for build-out is looking increasingly uncertain, as nuclear power faces both high costs and fierce competition from other energy sources in the electricity sector.

Wang Yinan, a researcher at the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is opposed to large-scale development of nuclear power, believing the risks involved are too great. The latest technology, known as Generation III+, is unproven in practice, with none of these new reactors yet in operation.

To compound the problem, regulatory staff and engineers are not yet up to speed with the new technology, raising concerns about safety.

As Schneider puts it, those capabilities take time to build up – it’s not just a matter of taking a training course in nuclear power. And in a country as densely populated as China, an accident could be catastrophic.

Nuclear target – 58GW by 2020 – unlikely to be achieved

A frenzy of construction in new coal-fired power stations and a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, has placed China’s with an electricity market in surplus. But China has approved new reactors in all of the last six years, with the exception of 2011 when a moratorium was placed after the Fukushima disaster.

National Development and Reform Commission plans would see China reach 58 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power generating capacity by 2020. However as only 51 GW of capacity is already in operation or under construction, it is very unlikely this target will be reached, given that length of time it takes to build new nuclear.

However some think that on current trends at least, nuclear power is essential. Lan Ziyong, chief engineer for the China Nuclear Energy Association is one. He outlines two reasons why it is needed. “First, to meet our emissions commitments; second because wind and solar power are not stable enough.”

The future will depend on whether or not technology can keep up with the trends. Yang Fuqiang, Senior Adviser on Climate, Energy and Environment for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that it would be feasible for nuclear power to provide 10%-12% of China’s energy, up from the current 3%.

“If there are new breakthroughs in nuclear technology and current safety concerns are resolved, nuclear power may yet have a longer lifespan”, Yang points out.

Zhang Chun is an editor in China Dialogue‘s Beijing office.

This article was originally published by China Dialogue under a Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License and 2.5 China License.