I have used thousands (if not tens of thousands) of paper towels in my life to dry my hands. However, I cannot recall one time I have used a paper towel to dry my hands properly. You might be asking yourself “How can someone use a paper towel incorrectly?”

All you do is take some paper towels and dry off your hands. Easy, right? Well not quite.

People usually grab four, five or even six paper towels to dry their hands. This over use leads to Americans wasting 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year. However, in the Ted Talk How To Use a Paper Towel ¹ , given by Joe Smith, he explains that only one paper towel is needed to dry his hands correctly. With his “shake and fold” method, he can save up to 571 million pounds of paper towel waste a year. Stay with me and I will explain how to do this.

How does the “shake and fold” method work?

Let’s start with the shake: after you are done washing your hands, shake them to remove any excess water.

Then the complicated part (the fold): grab one paper towel and fold it in half. Doing so creates interstitial suspension, a fancy term for creating extra space for water molecules. This makes the paper towel more absorbent.

If it’s the same paper towel how can it be more absorbent?

Well, interstitial suspension with paper towels can be explained by capillary action. If you have a flat paper towel it can hold a fixed amount of water and a folded paper towel holds the exact same. However, when you fold the paper towel you create a tiny gap between the layers where additional water can fit. This works because water is cohesive, which means the water molecules are slightly polar and are attracted to each other. This allows for another thin layer of water between the two layers of the paper towel. ²

What is a paper towel, anyway?

Paper towels use wood fibers from trees and break them down into a pulp, which requires wood and water to be mixed together. The pulp is then treated to make it a uniform color and a resin is added to help the fibers stick together. The water is then pressed out and the fibers are rolled into sheets.

All paper is made in this same manner; however paper towels are not pressed as hard, leaving more space between the fibers for water retention. Some paper towels are also embossed, which makes cool designs but also adds extra air spaces for water to go. ³

Many resources are used in the paper making process (chemicals, resin, electricity, etc). To make one ton of paper towels it takes 17 trees and 20,000 gallons of water. ⁴

So next time you wash your hands and are about to reach for a handful of paper towels, remember the words of Joe Smith: “shake and fold.” Less is more with this method. Or like any High Trails instructor, forget the paper towel altogether and dry your hands on your pants.

At High Trails Outdoor Science School, we literally force our instructors to write about elementary outdoor education, teaching outside, learning outside, our dirty classroom (the forest…gosh), environmental science, outdoor science, and all other tree hugging student and kid loving things that keep us engaged, passionate, driven, loving our job, digging our life, and spreading the word to anyone whose attention we can hold for long enough to actually make it through reading this entire sentence. Whew…. www.dirtyclassroom.com