Towel and Tissue Touch-and-Go

A cleaning manager selecting restroom paper products might think, “Paper is paper.” The next thought: Go for lower prices. Price is important, but only when weighed in the context of the “big three” paper-specifying considerations.

“There are three major issues [organizations] rally around: hygiene, image and cost effectiveness,” says Tom Banks, director of communications, Georgia-Pacific Corp. “All industries look for the same three things when selecting products, but in different orders of importance.”

Educational and government facilities typically place a lot of weight on cost. Health-care institutions often focus on health and hygiene, selecting products that fit touch-free dispensers, for example. Prestigious hotels and many office buildings often put image first on the list of paper prerequisites to attract and retain customers and tenants.

Two other criteria should weigh heavily in your paper-product decision: the extent to which a product is environmentally friendly and the current public attitude regarding health and hygiene issues. With paper products the latter consideration requires that you carefully select your paper-dispenser hardware.

Healthy choices
“People do everything they can to get through a restroom without touching anything,” says Doug Sutton, director of marketing, Kimberly-Clark Corp.

Touchless dispenser technology is the towel industry’s panacea for the disease-paranoid public. Some dispensers can be activated with the wave of a hand in front of a motion sensor that tells the dispenser to produce a towel. Other touch-free dispensers are designed so the end of a towel hangs down. Users pull on the towel without needing to touch the dispenser or the next towel.

What paper products say to people
The selection and management of towel and tissue impacts the image of the facility, including customer perception of restrooms and overall cleanliness.

“People have emotions and feelings connected to restrooms,” says Doug Sutton, director of marketing, Kimberly-Clark Corp.

It is not a bad idea for managers to test products on occupants before committing to a particular product.

“To some people in the institution, paper is very important,” says Harry Kendrick, director of housekeeping services, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H. “We substituted one kind of toilet paper with another and people were stopping me in the hall and saying, ‘what are you doing giving us this “plastic” toilet paper?’”

Look beyond first cost
If cost is the pivotal factor in selecting paper products, managers should look beyond the price tag and consider other ways to save money.

Manufacturers and distributors point out that roll paper towel produces waste less than folded towel.

“People tend to take less with roll towel,” Banks says. “Folded towels make it easy to grab more than you need. Sometimes they don’t unfold completely, so people aren’t using the entire surface and feel the need to take more.”

Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospitals are working on standardizing products and Kendrick says a battery-powered, touch-free dispenser has proven to reduce waste for the organization. “You can’t get another towel until you tear off the first one,” he says. “We also set the dispenser to have a five-second time delay between towels, which cut the number of towels used in half.”

Some cost-effective toilet tissue options include jumbo rolls and coreless rolls. “A lot of people don’t want to have a big, old wagon wheel on the wall,” Banks says. “Coreless tissue rolls down to the size of a dime and doubles the capacity of tissue so it cuts down on the number of times people have to change rolls.”

Toilet tissue dispensers with an automatic drop-down feature ensure the whole roll is used, Banks says. When refilling single-roll dispensers, cleaning workers often take out the roll too soon and throw away what is left.

Save the trees
“Manufacturers have been recycling and reusing for years and years,” says Randy Moss, president of Holstein Paper & Janitorial Supplies, Owings Mills, Md. He says managers should look for paper made from recycled post-consumer waste. Nonpost-consumer waste is “virgin” paper that is recycled from the plant in the manufacturing process.

Managers also should consider the cost of recycling product packaging and materials.

“We recycle about 37 percent of our waste,” Kendrick says. “We are always looking to reduce the volume.” He says paper products that come in cardboard require a lot of handling and processing. He suggests products packaged in plastic.

The final decision
Paper is still considered a “commodity” item among most housekeeping specifiers. Recent innovations in technology, along with the rise in health and environmental concerns, demand the specifier spend more time doing homework before he or she defaults, automatically, to cost.