Measurement Project
What If...
I Pull The Paper Towel By Myself?
🤔
Concept
This is 2022. Automation grows everywhere. A modern person usually uses 5 automatic services for each toilet experience. The door opens itself, the toilet flushes itself, water flows out without any operation, hand soap comes to your hand by itself, and the tissue box rolls the exact length of tissues you need. You do not have to touch anything except for yourself, and this is great, especially at the time of Covid-19.
However, is automation the only solution to prevent inter-personal physical contact? Some mechanical tissue boxes that allow you to touch only the tissue you pull out might have a different idea.
This project aims to estimate the energy cost of automatic dispenser usage and suspect what the amount of energy could do if it is not used for splitting paper towels for people who already have hands.
Data Sheet
16.5 inch
--------------- Total Energy
1*D cell battery: 74970 J
4*D cell batteries: 299760 J
------------------------ Towel Count /Roll
1150 ft /16.5 inch≈ 836 times
-------------------------------------- Energy Cost
Per Roll: 299760 J / 90≈ 3330 J
Per Towel: 3330 J / 836≈ 4 J
Statistics
4.6 Wed. 9am-9pm
6 TIMES, 24 J
4.19 Tue. 3pm-6:30pm
3 TIMES, 12 J
4.12 Tue. 6:30pm-6:30pm
4 TIMES, 16 J
4.20 Wed. 9am-9pm
5 TIMES, 20 J
4.13 Wed. 9am-6:30pm
4 TIMES, 16 J
Dispensing each piece of paper towel consumes 4 J of energy. According to the counting of my usage of the automatic dispenser, I consumed 88 J of energy in the last 15 days by using the paper towel dispensers.
88 J
is equivalent to the energy 1 gram of sesame seeds contain.
can support a fridge to run for 1 second.
can increase the temperature of 1ml of water by 21 degrees Celsius.
Relative Factors
I strongly agree with Smil that energy costs not only happen while you are using the product. Production, delivery, disposal, and supplies should all be considered as a part of the energy analysis.
Refill:
Automatic dispensers use paper rolls, and mechanical dispensers use folded tissues. The processes of producing the different types of supplies are shown below. The machines' power could be a factor that makes a difference in the total energy consumption of the dispensers.
Power Supply:
Besides the electronic energy stored in the batteries, producing battery products consumes energy. In this case, the automatic dispensers use alkaline batteries that need no specific treatment (some environmentally unfriendly batteries even have specific disposal requirements which request extra processes and human labor).
