Self-cleaning singaporean toilets of the future

Cleaning toilets, especially public ones, is not one of the most pleasant duties. This is mainly because public restrooms are places highly exposed to various bacteria and organic dirt, and yet, due to their function, they require a high level of hygiene. In order to protect people using them from germs and provide them with comfortable conditions, it is necessary to constantly monitor the cleanliness of public bathrooms and the level of consumables in them, which is not easy and requires a lot of work. That is why in Singapore it was decided that the best solution would be to simply...robotize public toilets.

Cleaning toilets, especially public ones, is not one of the most pleasant duties. This is mainly because public restrooms are places highly exposed to various bacteria and organic dirt, and yet, due to their function, they require a high level of hygiene. In order to protect people using them from germs and provide them with comfortable conditions, it is necessary to constantly monitor the cleanliness of public bathrooms and the level of consumables in them, which is not easy and requires a lot of work. That is why in Singapore it was decided that the best solution would be to simply...robotize public toilets.

Necessity is the mother of invention

The National Environmental Agency, a government agency under the Singapore Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, which is primarily responsible for public health and environmental protection, announced on July 31, 2019 that it has started working on a project to almost completely automate the cleaning of public toilets located near the so-called "hawker centers". These are open-air covered complexes that serve as marketplaces, where small gastronomy representatives offer cheap and warm meals to tourists and ordinary residents of the country. Each cabin of these toilets, visited daily by a huge number of people, will be completely rebuilt and, as a result, capable of not only cleaning the toilet bowls and seats without human intervention, but also regular cycles of washing the floors and walls with high-pressure water and detergent.

The bathroom won't do everything for you, but it can try

Of course, the toilet cabins designed by Red Dot Robotics are not able to completely eliminate the human factor, but the main goal of the Singaporean agency NEA is not to fully robotize the restrooms, but rather to increase the efficiency of their cleaning and improve the working conditions of the employees responsible for maintaining proper hygiene. Thanks to the showers on the walls and the floor trap revealing the drainage pipe, located near the heavily visited gastronomic complexes, the toilets will automatically get rid of dirt, paper and any other impurities that may end up on the tiles in the cabins. This will allow the cleaners to focus on replacing and replenishing consumables such as liquid soap and paper towels. The self-cleaning and drying toilet seats will make the only hygiene-related task left for the staff maintaining cleanliness to be checking for any particularly intense contaminants that require manual removal. This will not only increase the speed of cleaning the restrooms, which is crucial for places with a large number of tourists, but also limit the contact of employees with strong detergents.

USB Toilets?

The automation of the public toilet cleaning process is nothing new - there are already public bathrooms all over the world where toilet seats, after use, rotate 360 degrees, during which their surface is disinfected, increasing not only hygiene, but also the comfort of using this type of toilet. Less automated, but equally effective methods of increasing cleanliness include specially designed paper toilet seat liners and bags for disposing of particularly troublesome waste in women's toilets. However, the Singaporean project is something completely new and created with a large scale automation in mind. As the National Environmental Agency responsible for the project says, their goal is not only to increase the convenience for people using the toilets, but also to create a...Friendlier workplaces, where employees hired to maintain a proper level of cleanliness will not have to perform exhausting and tedious tasks, but instead will be able to focus on less demanding and more satisfying duties, such as operating and monitoring various machines and intelligent systems that oversee the cleanliness of bathrooms. It remains to be hoped that the project will be a great success and in the future, not only bathrooms, but all other rooms will relieve hard-working people and clean themselves of their own free will.

This post was created based on an article from CNA.

Ryszard Kurek