Handkerchief or tissue? Which one's better for our health and the planet?
Maybe you have hay fever, COVID, a cold or the flu, and are reaching for a tissue or handkerchief.
- Maybe you have hay fever, COVID, a cold or the flu, and are reaching for a tissue or handkerchief.
- But which one’s better at stopping infections spreading?
- Read more:
Health Check: what's the right way to blow your nose?
A short history of the handkerchief and tissue
- But such a simple square of cloth has a complex history.
- In the first century, the Romans used a sudarium (Latin for sweat cloth) to wipe off sweat, or to mask the mouth and face.
- We can trace the origins of paper tissue to China in the 2nd century BC.
- But it wasn’t until the 1920s that tissue as we know it today was developed to remove make-up and wipe
runny noses from hay fever.
So, which one is better for our health?
- Later, we were urged to use a hanky as “coughs and sneezes spread diseases”.
- So blowing your nose into a reusable cotton hanky, then touching another object, means these viruses can spread.
- But several studies have shown they do not effectively filter respiratory aerosols, or stop you inhaling pollutants, pathogens or small airborne particles.
Which one is better for the planet?
- Across the four measures, a cotton hanky had five to seven times greater impact than an equivalent tissue.
- And, by far, the greatest impacts were related to the production of each of these products, rather than using or disposing of them.
- If you want to feel better about using tissues, ones made from recycled material may be a better option.
If you want to look at environmental considerations, US company Ecosystem Analytics compared resusable cotton hankies to disposable paper tissues using a lifecycle analysis. It considered four measures of environmental impacts associated with production, transport, use and disposal:
The verdict
- But tissues don’t quite have the same panache as the historic and versatile cloth hanky.
- Mark Patrick Taylor is a full-time employee of EPA Victoria, appointed to the statutory role of Chief Environmental Scientist.