I am just now coming out of Office toilet and see a heap of Paper we use to dry our hands after washing. I immediately felt there must lots of paper like this in every floor and with in just one office it will at least 50 rolls, or more.  If we add up all office buildings in one city and then extrapolate this further and further, we can get an idea of amount of paper towels we would end up at the end of the day. From my view point, its too much of wastage I felt and wanted to ask if we can stop this..

In all western countries, they have this concept of drying hands with paper after washing. I have googled immediately and found out that 20-40% of waste in every office building is because of this waste paper and all this is going to landfill sites.

Yes, definitely this paper cannot be recycled, because we are cleaning our hands to clean the germs after washing. So we are not going to recycle this and get the germs back.  So the question of recycling is out

We can use them as compost for plants and trees. So instead of ending up in landfill if all these different papers end up in compost then they can be useful for the plant life. So every office building, if they adopt this practice of dumping all the paper towels at the end of day into compost bin and then as the days move on the compost can be used for the office garden or probably can be moved out to near by municipal gardens. So with just little amount of initiative, the amount of waste ending up in landfill can be reduced by a big margin. All the cleaning services is usually outsourced to some different companies anyway, so offices can make it as mandate to the cleaning companies. This way every one can be benefited in the end and with little bit of initiative and responsible thinking, this can definitely make a difference

Yes, still I could not stop thinking that so much of paper is being used, and to serve this purpose how many trees are being cut. So we cant the western offices use things like cloth or hand drier instead of paper. I have seen cloth in many places but is not maintained good. Use of electric hand drier is there in many places, but I still think people prefer to use paper towels if option available.

Is there another alternate to solve this riddle, some thing similar to paper towels but which is material and not from nature. This question might have come to so many entrepreneurs and there might be some replacements already available but probably not cost effective, so we are still using paper towels. I hope there is more investment in science and biology to make more discoveries and inventions to solve these kind of riddles, hopefully this riddle will be solved in a decade