explanation of problem
During the winter months, absenteeism increases because of colds. Direct contact is one way of spreading these germs and bacteria that promotes sickness, whether minor or major. Active paper towel dispensers can easily carry many of these harmful organisms; if someone touches them, they've just experienced direct contact with a bacteria-infested object. One option to solve the problem is to use hand blowers, which reduce direct contact, therefore reducing the amount of germs spread. However, they are not efficient; it might take a full 5 minutes to dry your hands completely on some hand dryers. Also, the commercial ones that are in rest stops, very big chain stores (Costco), and other prominent places cost a lot of money to maintain and waste electricity. Money is a very urgent problem in America and other countries these days. So unless suddenly, our economy is healed and is thriving, those kinds of hand dryers are only going to stay in important places (not including schools). But is it worth the money or wasting electricity to get these automatic hand dryers everywhere?
Regular, old-fashioned, paper towel dispensers are the other option. They're quick and cheap, but then again, they pass germs. We came up with ideas to solve this problem (How can we improve a paper towel dispenser so it has no cons, only pros)? There was no way for us to change the economy or electricity in our position, so we quickly realized we couldn't work with automatic paper towel dispensers. However, our other option, the regular dispensers was something we could work with, since the problem was different. Here, germs were the big deal. So we came up with many methods that could be used to kill germs. Washing your hands with soap is the best way, but since everybody usually washes their hands before taking a paper towel, and our control group had a huge amount of bacteria growth, in our experiment, nor would people actually wash their hands unless they needed to, we came to the conclusion that either people don't wash their hands well or they just wouldn't want to do it. Also, upon cursory examination and a survey, we discovered that not many people wash their hands for the correct amount of time. So that choice was eliminated. The next three we came up with were good; tissues as a physical barrier and hand sanitizer as germ killing substances. Which one was best? We didn't know. We could do as much research as we wanted, but the web pages would say all different things. What we had to do is conduct an experiment to find the real answer, so that's what we did.
The experiment was designed to see how bacteria accumulates on the lever of the paper towel dispenser and how avoiding direct contact or using tissues and hand sanitizer affects the accumulation of bacteria on there. In the end, since germs and bacteria still grew on the knob even after using the materials and the fact that these materials had to be replenished regularly, those options were deemed less practical.
Regular, old-fashioned, paper towel dispensers are the other option. They're quick and cheap, but then again, they pass germs. We came up with ideas to solve this problem (How can we improve a paper towel dispenser so it has no cons, only pros)? There was no way for us to change the economy or electricity in our position, so we quickly realized we couldn't work with automatic paper towel dispensers. However, our other option, the regular dispensers was something we could work with, since the problem was different. Here, germs were the big deal. So we came up with many methods that could be used to kill germs. Washing your hands with soap is the best way, but since everybody usually washes their hands before taking a paper towel, and our control group had a huge amount of bacteria growth, in our experiment, nor would people actually wash their hands unless they needed to, we came to the conclusion that either people don't wash their hands well or they just wouldn't want to do it. Also, upon cursory examination and a survey, we discovered that not many people wash their hands for the correct amount of time. So that choice was eliminated. The next three we came up with were good; tissues as a physical barrier and hand sanitizer as germ killing substances. Which one was best? We didn't know. We could do as much research as we wanted, but the web pages would say all different things. What we had to do is conduct an experiment to find the real answer, so that's what we did.
The experiment was designed to see how bacteria accumulates on the lever of the paper towel dispenser and how avoiding direct contact or using tissues and hand sanitizer affects the accumulation of bacteria on there. In the end, since germs and bacteria still grew on the knob even after using the materials and the fact that these materials had to be replenished regularly, those options were deemed less practical.