The paper industry lost its battle with plastic grocery bags years ago, without a struggle. By unanimous decision it also lost the fight with plastics for the consumer milk jug market, as well as (more recently) containers for fruit juices and just about every other liquid humans consume regularly, including water.
In today's grocery stores, discount superstores, and drug/convenience stores, more and more stuff is being packaged in plastic bottles and jugs, from barbecue sauce and washing powder to cat food. The gates of plastic hell have opened wide these past few years.
When it comes to resisting competition from alternative packaging, paper has always been the canvas back kid. Sure, some paper cartons can still be found on refrigerated grocery shelves—soy milk (and other disgusting non-dairy substitutes), coffee creamers, whipping cream, buttermilk, eggnog, egg substitutes, etc. But where it really counts, where the shopper's hand meets the big cold handle, plastic jugs rule supreme across this country.
Fortunately, paper has more or less held its own in frozen food packaging over the years, thanks to ingenious composite materials technology and the fact that it's hard to thaw/heat foods in all-plastic containers without warping them and producing unattractive odors and tastes. Most plastics don't make good cooking utensils.
Other paper products that have continued to do OK against competition include, of course, tissue and toweling. Plastic doesn't have (yet) a product to compete with paper towels and toilet tissue, though who knows what the future might bring. But one determined, dangerous competitor lurking around the AFH (away from home) hand towel market for a half century at least does warrant more careful attention these days.
Electric Tissue
I once did a column on electric hand dryers that used an engineering company's exclusive calculations to show that, on a per-dry-hands basis, paper towels were considerably less costly than electric dryers. That was in the 1970s when the U.S. and most of the western world was suffering a severe energy crisis. For that matter, it appears to be on the threshold of a similar crisis today.
It wasn't even close in the '70s and '80s. Electric hand dryers with high wattage elements and high capacity fans simply were not energy efficient, especially multiplied by several thousand dryings per week per unit. But the technology has evolved recently.
In fact, reading through literature on some of the newer hand dryers, I was amazed at how far and fast electric hand drying appears to have come in the past four or five years. If you can believe even some of the promotional materials, one unit in particular offers a 90% - 95% direct monthly savings compared with the purchase/shipping costs for paper hand towels, and a per-unit payback of only a couple of months.
To prove it, the manufacturer's website provides a program that will make an interesting (though questionable) comparative calculation based on your actual cost inputs (for tissue products, energy, etc.). I tried the program, using unrealistic cheap towel costs and high KWH energy prices. The dryer won every time, by at least 75%.
Instead of 30 – 45 sec drying sessions, the newer units do it in a total of 10 – 15 sec. Using 15-1mp service, most employ a very high, unheated air blast to blow away 75% or more of the water from a user's hands, followed by only a few seconds of heated air to dry residual moisture. The resulting cost is only a fraction of that with older conventional dryers.
Although much of this promotional hype is very questionable, it's not likely that the canvas back kid will do anything but take another dive as competition heats up. In the meantime, I am seeing a startling number of these new units in big restaurants, public sports arenas/stadiums, hotels, convention centers, etc.
Maybe it's time, this time, to wake up and smell the ozone.
