By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-01 07:21

I still remember visiting my father's home village in Central China's Hubei Province when I was seven years old. The place I shuddered going to most was the toilet. It was in a shed built of straw. It consisted of nothing but a hole in the ground. There was no flush water. Drawn by the stink, flies were always hovering around.

My fears aside, I had no idea that toilets could be associated with a host of issues from economic development, environmental sustainability to gender equality.

In the 1960s, it was not the time to discuss toilets, as China was still struggling to feed and clothe 600 million people. The economic boom the country has enjoyed since the late 1970s has dramatically changed the landscape as well as transformed public toilets in major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai.

As the host of the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing started to upgrade about 5,000 public toilets in the city two years ago, so that visitors "would not have to use their nose to look for a loo", according to the organizers.

Sanitation and toilets go hand-in-hand with economic development. This is being highlighted at the Seventh World Toilet Summit, which opened yesterday in New Delhi with scholars from about 40 countries meeting to discuss ways to help every one on earth have access to toilets by 2025.

According to the United Nations, about 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, do not use a toilet, but defecate in the open or in unsanitary places. The number is a far cry from the UN Millennium Development Goal No 7, which projects to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by the year 2015.

While people in developing countries still have an enormous task to improve the hygienic and sanitary standards of toilets in their own homes, towns and cities, some experts sounded an alarm as early as four years ago that the developing nations would create an "environmental disaster" if they followed in the footsteps of the Americans and Europeans to rely on modern flush toilets and the resultant sewage infrastructure.

The warning is not without merit. According to calculations by some experts published a few years ago, 30 percent of clean water was used to flush toilets in the United Kingdom. And another report revealed that the average Londoner used more water every day - about 165 liters per person - than the UK average of 150 liters or the 120 liters per person in European cities like Copenhagen and Berlin.

No wonder two years ago, London Mayor Ken Livingstone made headlines by calling on Londoners to save water by flushing toilets less.

It is worth noting that sustainable sanitation and the environment is one of the major topics under discussion at the on-going world toilet summit.

And sustainable sanitation is being taken into account as Beijing prepares for a Green Olympics. The people in charge of improving public toilets claim that each new public washroom in the city will use only recycled water and consume about 1 ton of water a year.

While the average urban Beijinger uses between 100 and 108 liters of water per day, the city is considering placing a ceiling and charging more for excessive water usage.

Environment aside, people have also started to talk about gender mainstreaming associated with toilets, which is also a topic at the summit. In China, there has been talk about reconstructing washrooms for females to make them at least as big as the ones for males, since in many public places or in offices, the washrooms for women are invariably smaller, even though it takes longer for women to use them.

E-mail: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/01/2007 page10)