This year’s clean toilet campaign to continue focus on flushing out bad habits
Cleaners Li Xiu Mei (left) and Yuen Kok Yeow hope people will look after a public toilet as if it were their own. ST PHOTO: HESTER TAN
As a cleaner, Ms Li Xiu Mei, 56, is often greeted by the pungent stench of human waste left overnight when she reports for duty in the morning. She has also mopped up trails of faecal matter that have hardened on the toilet floor, unclogged toilets choked with waste left unflushed overnight, and scraped off lumps of toilet paper stuck on the walls by naughty youngsters.
“Some users wash up inside and leave footprints everywhere, and sometimes the toilets are choked with toilet paper,” said Ms Li, an employee at One Punggol Hawker Centre, in Mandarin. “Each toilet normally takes around 10 minutes to clean, but these kinds of mess will take us anywhere up to an hour to clean.” It seems Singapore still has some way to go to making it a habit to keep public lavatories clean – an issue the National Environment Agency (NEA) aims to re-emphasise in the latest edition of its Clean Public Toilets campaign. The campaign, which is in its fifth run, was started in 2018.
The 2023 campaign urges the public to be responsible, even when no one is around, and to make sure the floor and toilet seats are dry, as well as to use the flush. Titled “Are you nice when no one’s around? Do it right for everyone”, the campaign is backed by the Public Hygiene Council, the Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) and the Restroom Association (Singapore).
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Clean Public Toilets Campaign 2023 to include pilot toilet cleanliness module for primary school students
Cleaners at work in a toilet at One Punggol Hawker Centre. (Photo: CNA)
The National Environment Agency (NEA) on Tuesday (Nov 21) launched its annual Clean Public Toilets Campaign, with this iteration including a programme that will see primary school students cleaning toilets.
Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and the Environment Baey Yam Keng launched the campaign in conjunction with the Public Hygiene Council (PHC), Restroom Association Singapore (RAS) and Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) at One Punggol Hawker Centre. The campaign comes on the back of a Singapore Management University (SMU) study released on Nov 8 which found that coffee shop toilets were as dirty as they were three years ago, but that public hygiene standards at hawker centres had seen some improvement.
The SMU study surveyed more than 1,000 toilets located in coffee shops and hawker centres and sought the views of 9,411 people. It found an unfavourable overall perception of public toilets. About 91.31 per cent of customers said toilets in hawker centres and coffee shops needed “major overhauling”, rating them as “dirty”. Even employees rated these toilets as dirty, with about 70 per cent rating the degree of improvement needed as “moderate”. The study also found that only 6 per cent of respondents were optimistic about the efficacy of clean toilet campaigns.
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World Toilet Day 2023
City and town folk cannot imagine a life without permanent toilets. 3.6 billion people living in the world today, however, don’t have access to a proper toilet. Compromised sanitation can wreak havoc across communities by contamination of our food and water and the spread of serious diseases that take lives. World Toilet Day is observed on November 19 every year, to bring awareness about the importance of toilets and sanitation in our lives.
World Toilet Day was an initiative of a certain Jack Sim from Singapore, who founded the World Toilet organisation NGO in the year 2001. It was his idea to use the day to raise awareness about the importance of sanitation and hygiene. This initiative was backed by the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA). In 2010, the UN recognised the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) as a fundamental human right.
It was in the year 2013, on July 24 that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in its 67th session passed a resolution by which it designated November 19 as World toilet Day.
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