Experts call for end of flushing toilets on World Toilet Day

World Toilet Organization (WTO) is a global non-profit organization committed to improving toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide. WTO was recently appointed to the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Water Security.

19 November is World Toilet Day - a day to celebrate the humble, yet vitally important, toilet and to raise awareness of the global sanitation crisis. World Toilet Day was declared in 2001 by 17 toilet associations around the world.

The World Toilet Organisation has the following objectives:

• Establish a world body to coordinate and promote sanitation issues.
• To continuously generate awareness for the importance of a good toilet environment.
• To gather resources and promote creative development in the Research & Development, Usage & Attitudes and Aesthetics & Functionalities in Design for the betterment of health in general.
• To propagate the need for better toilet standards in both the developed and developing economies of the world.
• To provide and promote a community of all toilet associations, related organizations and committed individuals to facilitate an exchange of ideas, health and cultural matters.
• To collate, publish and disseminate information globally in a timely and viable manner globally.

As the World celebrated the World Toilet Day, the sanitation experts have called for an end of the flushing toilet to save water. While speaking at the World Toilet Summit in Macau, WTO's founder Jack Sims said that a culture where people flushed their toilets but disregarded the thousands of litres of wasted water each year was one of the sanitation's greatest challenges.

In Australia the experts have proposed new toilet tax in order to reduce the amount of water wasted through toilet flushing. A professor at Adelaide University said that the tax would encourage people to take shorter showers, recycle washing machine water or connect rainwater tanks to internal plumbing.

Some toilet facts you may want to know

• The average person spends three years of their life on the "john".
• The average person flushes a toilet about 2500 times a year, while using about eight sheets of toilet paper per day.
• An estimated 2.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to proper toilet facilities, particularly in rural areas of China and India.
• Lack of suitable toilets and sanitation kills approximately 1.8 million people a year, many of them children.
• According to Jack Sims, a further 500 million toilets are needed to bridge the gap in sanitation.
• The first flushing toilet was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harrington, a British noble and godson to Queen Elizabeth I. He only invented one, as he was ridiculed by his peers, but he still used it for himself.
• On average, a person will use 22 litres of drinkable water every day flushing a toilet.