When the trend-spotting Huffington Post starts to write about shop towels versus industrial wipers, you know something bigger than typical shop talk is going on. One of their articles featured a study1 from Gradient, the environmental research company, exposing just how toxic even freshly cleaned cloth rental shop towels can be. And while the author raised an important workplace safety issue (with just enough sensationalism to attract the eye of trendy “HuffPo” readers), she, and even the study she cites, didn’t give the whole picture. If you take a closer look, you can see just how much the choice between textile towels and disposal wipers truly impacts the businesses, and workers, who use them.
