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Clever Design for a Minimal Paper Towel Dispenser that Hides the Roll

Invented by a retired gym teacher

By Rain Noe - February 13, 2023

in Organization

No one wants a paper towel holder; what people want is paper towels on demand, and as much free counterspace as possible. The paper towel holder is a clumsy middleman that takes up space.

Barbro Holmström, a retired gym teacher who lives outside of Stockholm, invented her own rather clever paper towel dispenser. Holmström had had her kitchen renovated, and realized after the fact that there was no room for a paper towel holder on either the wall or the counter. So she sacrificed a bit of cabinet space, drilled a hole in the bottom of one of the cabinets, filed some teeth into the bottom of a short length of PVC pipe, stuck the pipe through the hole, and fed the paper towels through the pipe.

Here's the production version of her invention, called the Rivröret ("Tear Pipe," translated from Swedish):

"Actually, it was surprisingly easy to come up with the idea," Holmström said in a press release. "The challenge was to maintain simplicity and not complicate the product. It is precisely the simplicity that makes the Tear Pipe so good - no loose parts and super easy assembly. I was enthusiastically cheered on by those around me, and those who tested the Tear Pipe in our kitchen immediately wanted one of their own."

Holmström set up a company to sell her invention over a decade ago. Today it's distributed in over 4,000 locations.

One thing that would prevent this from succeeding in the U.S. market is that by necessity of the design, the paper towels are fed from the center of the paper towel roll. I imagine that in Sweden paper towel rolls are sold without cardboard cores, as they are in America. Those cores, glued as they are to the paper towels, would be a tricky thing to extract.

I also wonder what happens as you get to the end of the roll—with no resistance, do the last few sheets all come out together, or does the diameter of the roll prevent that?

In any case, here's an installation video:

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Ryan Cee

a year ago

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Center-pull extraction is fairly common system of towel holder but typically institutional. It makes for a super simple towel dispenser with no moving parts, the only issue being the fact it requires a slightly non-standard paper towel roll. Not likely to be in stock at your usual grocery store, but almost any commercial supply company would have it. When you think about it, it's better for the environment given the lack of hard cardboard tube in the middle and the simplicity of manufacturing dispensing units.

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- Dee An
  
  Ryan Cee
  
  a year ago
  
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  And interestingly, the toilet paper supply problems in the early COVID era were due to a disconnect between the domestic supply chain and the commercial supply chain (toilet paper for restaurants and offices was left under used)
  
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Douglas Bowker

a year ago

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I feel like it could be fed from any roll mounted either vertically or even horizontally. But it's a rare situation where you can't just mount the roll under the cabinet itself, and even more rare to have extra internal cabinet space. Visually it's nice to have the paper roll hidden I suppose.
I also wonder why the tube needs to go down that far? Couldn't it work with a half-inch (1.5 cm) below the cabinet bottom? Anyway, obviously there is a market for it so kudos for taking what started as a "project" all the way!

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