The Waterloo study, whose results were released last November, followed previous surveys done in 2016 and 2020. The study showed that coffee shop toilets were seen to be as dirty as they were three years ago.
Ms Rosie Ching, principal lecturer of Statistics at the Singapore Management University, who was behind the study, and joined the show, said: “They are cramped, wet, poorly lit. The toilet seats are stained with … things that should have been flushed away long ago. Not a pretty picture at all.”
“How do we go about tackling this problem? We know that they’re hardly clean because when you see the cleaning schedules, they’re either not present or not updated,” she added.
She said that the problem with coffee shop toilets is partly an infrastructure issue.
She noted that many of these toilets were built decades ago, and can be narrow and cramped, which leaves little room for robot cleaners.
She proposed that toilets, especially those in coffeeshops, should come with hygiene ratings like food stalls.
Dr Koh added that when people go into a clean place, they want to keep it clean, but they do not feel the same impetus when they enter a dirty place.
She said that it is troubling that for Singapore to be as clean as it is, it requires an “army of cleaners”, referring to the about 60,000 cleaners helping the country.
“If we had one day where the cleaners did nothing, what would that version of Singapore look like?” she asked.
“And that might actually be a wake up call for us to say, it actually took us hundreds and thousands of cleaners who have done this and we take them for granted.”
