The building is visually impressive, and does incorporate numerous eco-friendly initiatives including solar panels on the roof, great use of natural light in the atrium, non-toxic building materials (take that McKinley!), and fixtures to reduce water use.

However, this AWOL blogger noticed something a bit ironic. While the men’s restroom does contain an environmentally friendly state-of-the-art water-less urinal (sorry for the level of detail), there are no electric hand-dryers, only paper towels.

Last time I was in there, the trashcan was literally overflowing with paper towels. Come to think of it, most of the facilities around campus seem to favor wasteful paper towels to hand dryers.

Now, I’m no expert, but according to treehugger.com, paper towels are worse for the environment than electric hand dryers when measured by almost any metric. All things considered, paper towels have a much larger carbon footprint, and have twice the global warning impact as hand dryers.

Personally, I’m a fan of shaking off the hands and letting your jeans do the rest, but if you must, hand dryers are nicer to nature than paper towels. It’s great to have a gold-certified LEED building on campus, but either LEED is not so green, or AU shirked on the contract. I presume the latter.