In the United States alone, the average person uses 50 pounds of tissue paper per year, using up about seven trees worth of paper. Paper represents over one-third of all municipal waste and roughly 9% of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. With increasing concerns for the destruction of forests, it has become more important to reduce paper waste.
So why is it that people waste so much paper by insisting on drying their hands with paper towels following their going to the bathroom? Of course most public restrooms offer another option, a technological solution mind you, in that annoyingly loud and energy consuming air-dry-unit. I guess the general consensus must be that wet hands are bad.
With that said, I'd like to know what's wrong with using the back, sides, or front of one's pants? I can understand a woman in a fancy dress or slacks, or a man in an equally fancy suit, but college kids still wearing their pajamas from the night before or the casually dressed? It seems that most perform this task rather mindlessly with little consideration for the environmentally-destructive action their participating in (needless production and all that comes with it).
Perhaps the next time you wash following your using the toilet, you should consider using your clothing to dry your hands instead of the environmentally unfriendly means provided. Conditioning is a fact of life and we should try our best to recognize those little things that we were mindlessly conditioned to do, and perhaps then we can stop doing them. With a little thought and consideration solutions to these mindless acts will begin to come with ease. Consider the effect that one's willingness to dry their hands by simply flicking the water from their fingers down into the sink (2 or 3 quick flicks), and then with little effort, simply wiping the remaining water onto their pants, pants that their most likely going to wash after wearing once or twice anyway, would have. It's in the little things.