SINGAPORE - 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).

Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and the Environment Baey Yam Keng, who was at the campaign’s launch on Nov 21 at One Punggol Hawker Centre, made the rounds to promote the campaign to diners and food stall operators.

He said he hopes the campaign will remind toilet users to be responsible, and remind operators to keep their toilets well-maintained.

Mr Baey said: “There’s this interesting phenomenon – when a place is dirty, people don’t mind making it dirtier, but if it is clean, we won’t want to make it dirty. So we are trying to create this virtuous circle... and that’s where everyone plays a part.”

The campaign comes on the back of souring sentiment about the state of public toilets here.

A study of more than 9,000 Singaporeans by Singapore Management University in 2023 found that two-thirds of respondents said public toilets in hawker centres and coffee shops either remain as dirty as they were three years ago or have become dirtier.

About 60 per cent of them said efforts in cleaning up public toilets were mostly futile, while only 6 per cent of Singaporeans felt clean toilet campaigns were helpful.

Responding to the survey, Mr Baey said: “I think the survey gives us a good indicator of the state of play today.”

He noted the findings that coffee shops, in particular, were struggling to keep their lavatories clean, and added that this could be due to manpower constraints.

As part of the campaign, NEA will reach out to at least 2,000 premises across the country, including food centres, parks, schools and sports facilities to promote the campaign message.

Ms Michelle Tay, SKM’s director of programmes and operations, said toilet operators can do their part to ensure that flushes and other equipment are working, while the campaign can nudge the public to be mindful of their own cleanliness.

There are usually only two cleaners assigned to clean the toilets at One Punggol Hawker Centre, said one of the cleaners, Mr Yuen Kok Yew, 50, who hopes people will look after a public toilet as if it was their own.

Besides the toilets, he is also responsible for keeping the hawker centre clean, but often finds himself stuck in the loo for hours to clean up the mess left behind by visitors.

Mr Yuen said: “People always think there is someone else who will clean up after them. But I hope people will treat it like it’s their own home. We’d feel much more relaxed.”