Several years ago a US newspaper ran a story about a man who decided not to defecate in a toilet for a year but instead emptied his bowels outside on a tray. He allowed his faeces to dry and then stored it safely and securely. At the end of the year the residue did not even fill two standard shoe boxes while the water the man saved by not having to flush the toilet totalled about 12,000 gallons - or enough to fill 5,000 shoe boxes.
"Moreover," said Benjamin Pratt, of the University of Wisconsin, "the article said the man claimed the chemicals in the residue were expensive to produce and could be put to good use." Pratt delivered this tale as part of a paper entitled The Evolution of Bathrooms - Predictions for the Future, at this month's inaugural World Toilet Summit in Singapore. The three-day gathering, attended by about 200 people from 17 countries, overflowed with many similarly lurid stories. King Louis XIII of France apparently decided to save time by holding audiences while on his other "throne"; the Japanese have designed a toilet that does an automatic analysis of your urine and gives a printout by the time you've washed and dried your hands; and the average person spends about three years of their life on the toilet.
Furthermore, research shows that in South Korea people who want to repress their need to pee run a pencil round their palm anti-clockwise, while those who want to accelerate the trip to the toilet do it clockwise; and virtually all women across the globe are horrified by the thought of having to use a female urinal.
The conference was attended by academics, social workers, government officials, psychologists, interior designers and industry experts trying to lift the lid on global toilet culture and improve it, particularly in the developing world.
One of the priorities was to brainstorm ways to make people more open about their toilet habits and not just hide behind an embarrassed, sniggering smile as most tend to do. "There's been a sexual liberation but no defecation liberation," said Dr Clara Greed of the University of the West of England and a member of the British Toilet Association. "That's got to change or millions of people are going to die." She is not exaggerating. In his opening speech, Singapore's acting environment minister, Lim Swee Say, said that access to basic sanitation is an unattainable luxury for many people. "According to a report by the world health organisation, 40 per cent of the world's population still does not have access to adequate sanitation," he said. "Of these, 80 per cent reside in Asia."
An Indian social philanthropist, Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, put it more starkly when he said that 700 million Indians "shit in the fields every day". Many of these are women who are too embarrassed to defecate in front of others so are forced to wait until after sunset, thereby causing further anguish, pain, and injury to their internal organs.
Much of the discussion was on ways to improve public toilets, and to reduce statistics such as the one revealing that 80 per cent of women reportedly hover over public toilets rather than sit on the seat as they are afraid of catching germs. This is ironic according to Bill Chapman from the Australian Toilet Association. He cited results of research by New Zealand's University of Auckland in Australian public toilets that revealed the cleanest thing was the seat and the dirtiest was the door handle to get out.
The local government in Seoul, South Korea, is trying to improve public toilets by awarding cards to the owners. Those that are unsatisfactory are yellow carded and if they fail to improve they are shown an orange card and then, the ultimate humiliation, a red card. They are also shamed in the local press. Owners that do improve their conveniences are shown a blue card and then, after further improvement, the ultimate prize of a green card. They are lauded in the media.
Paruresis - the fear of using public bathrooms - was also much discussed. This phobia, also known as bashful bladder, blights an estimated 7 per cent of the population although this figure could be higher as many people are too embarrassed to admit they have it.
Nancy Pickering of the International Paruresis Association explained in a paper on the subject that paruresis does not stop people wanting to go to the toilet; they just can't do it in public conveniences that are used by other people. The result is that paruretics can find it hard to eat out at restaurants that aren't close to home, go on long journeys, or even sit through long films.
Designers should also consider that toilets are used for many other things besides relieving oneself, participants said.
"People think much more in the toilet than elsewhere and with more concentration," Dr Pathak said. "They should really be called peace and reflection rooms and designed accordingly." Dr Alex Gardner, a Scottish psychologist, described how toilets, particularly at offices which provide increasingly little privacy, are used as "stress-out rooms" in the absence of anywhere else and should have facilities to cater for this purpose.
To help to raise awareness of these, and other toilet issues, November 19th, the opening day of the conference, was declared World Toilet Day. "We are going to petition the United Nations to get this approved," said the conference chairman, Jack Sim. He also announced the formation of the WTO - the World Toilet Organisation - and the accompanying website: www.worldtoilet.org Running concurrently with the summit was Restroom Asia 2001, a trade show offering the latest cutting edge developments in toilet technology. Among the highlights was a Korean invention that dispenses with the need for toilet paper, giving users a wash and blow dry at the press of a button.
But perhaps most attention was drawn by the female urinal, described to me as an extended upside-down petrol pump nozzle that a user has to back on to. Most people were not convinced about its merits because it is hard to use for people wearing trousers, offers little privacy - unlike the male equivalent - and is not practical for women who are menstruating.
Indeed, this was one subject that was not raised at all, which goes to show that even among the most liberated of the world's defecating cognoscenti, there still appear to be some subjects that many people prefer just to flush out of sight.