New Hand Dryers for a Sustainable Campus

Hand Dryers for a Sustainable Campus

Installing the Dyson Airblade V during the renovation of a campus building and relocation of the admission center allowed Boston University to greatly reduce landfill waste and further their mission of sustainability.

Chartered in 1869, Boston University (BU) is one of the nation’s largest private urban research universities. With over 33,000 students, nearly 10,000 staff and 17 schools and colleges offering 250 fields of study, BU ranks in the top 50 of U.S. News & World Report ’s annual ranking of the nation’s top universities.

Boston University’s aim is to drive change on campus and integrate sustainability into existing education, research and operations programs to reduce energy consumption and decrease waste across its two campuses. With the Facilities Management & Planning department, the initiative aims to improve the sustainability of existing campus buildings, renovations and new construction.

To improve a prospective student’s experience with a larger, more technologically advanced space, BU decided to renovate an existing campus building and relocate its admission center there. To support their mission of sustainability at the Leventhal Center, the university decided to try the Dyson Airblade V hand dryer in four of the admission center restrooms.

In the four restrooms with Airblade™ technology, paper towels were not installed as a hand drying option, therefore reducing the waste that’s generated from paper towels. Assuming that an estimated 70,000 annual visitors to the Leventhal Center use the Dyson Airblade hand dryer instead of paper towels, over 140,000 paper towels would be saved from going into a landfill annually.

www.dysonairblade.com

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • Spaces4Learning Launches 2026 Facilities and Construction Brief Survey

    Spaces4Learning recently launched the 2026 Facilities and Construction Brief Survey, which collects data on the previous year’s K–12 and higher education construction projects nationwide.

  • Q&A: How to Prevent Kitchen Grease Fires in Commercial Kitchens

    School cafeterias and university dining halls serve thousands of meals daily, relying on high-heat equipment like fryers, grills, and ovens. While these operations keep students fed, they also generate significant grease-laden vapors. Without proper controls, this grease becomes a silent fire threat. As a certified exhaust cleaning specialist and business coach who has helped hundreds of institutional facilities achieve NFPA 96 compliance, I emphasize that proactive grease management isn’t optional; it’s a core fire/life safety practice.

  • Dallas ISD Voters Approve $6.2B Bond Package

    Dallas ISD voters have approved a record-setting $6.2-billion bond package that district leaders say will modernize aging campuses, eliminate portable classrooms and reshape learning environments across one of the nation’s largest school systems.

  • Opportunity by Design Framework

    Opportunity by Design

    Educational improvement efforts often focus on curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development, and intervention systems while treating the physical school building as background. But school design is not a passive backdrop to learning — it is a structural lever for equity.