- (Reuters) -- Flushed with the success of making Singapore's
lavatories amongst the cleanest in the world, a Singapore-based organisation
is marking "World Toilet Day" today with a call for more hygiene
in public facilities.
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- "What we are trying to do is break the taboo over
toilets," said Jack Sim, a founding member of the non-profit World
Toilet Organisation.
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- "Everybody talks about what goes into the body and
no one talks about what comes out," he said.
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- The two-year-old World Toilet Organisation (www.worldtoilet.org),
which aims to raise global awareness of toilet and sanitation standards,
marked its annual World Toilet Day on Wednesday with a call for people
to speak out against poorly designed or filthy latrines.
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- The group is collecting tips ahead of a World Toilet
Summit to be held in Beijing next year.
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- The group -- whose members include the British Toilet
Association and 17 other similar organisations from 13 countries -- has
a top-10 list of latrine essentials that Sim says will lead to "happier
people".
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- The average person, according to the group's website,
visits the toilet 2,500 times a year -- meaning you spend nearly three
years of your life in the lavatory.
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- To make the experience more enjoyable, parents should
teach children to aim properly, toilet seats should be wiped clean before
and after use and flush handles that don't work should be reported.
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- The group also urged new projects to alleviate a serious
lack of toilets in many parts of the world.
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- "More than half of the world population do not have
toilets. They are defecating openly," said Sim, who is also president
of the Restroom Association of Singapore.
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- Women, he says, suffer most from poor public lavatories.
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- "The amount of space for women's and men's toilets
is often a mirror image of each other. But the female requires more than
that because they don't have urinals," he said.
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- "The men just go to the urinals, zip down, shoot,
finish. That usually takes about 32 seconds.
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- "A women can take three times as long. This means
a queue can form -- and when there is a queue it starts to get dirty."
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- He said Japanese toilets were among the best in the world,
but those in Beijing were improving fast ahead of the 2008 Olympics.
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- "The toilets in Beijing now are really beautiful.
They have renovated 2,000 public toilets," he said.
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- Singapore boasts some of the cleanest public lavatories
in the world -- helped in part by automatic flushers and laws which impose
fines on people who don't flush after use.
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