Shanghai's toilets ready for Expo visitors

Much like the better toilet campaign enacted in Beijing before the Olympics, Shanghai is upgrading its public restrooms in time for the World Expo.

The host has cleaned up and renovated more than 11,000 public toilets in and around the 5,280,000-sq-m Expo site to meet the "urgent needs" of roughly 70 million expected Expo visitors.

These public toilets guarantee about 8,000 visitors at a time. Using water supplied partly by rainwater collected in the Sunshine Valley, they are adjustable according to the ratio of service area for female and male users.

According to Zhou Minhua, director of technical service department of Shanghai Expo, a tracking survey on toilet usage was conducted in the last decade.

"Public toilets at Aichi World Expo in 2005 were thought to be a humanized design, yet the problem of inadequate toilets came into focus," Zhou said, remarking that it took women about 15 minutes to queue for a toilet seat.

Zhou reassures visitors to next month's World Expo that they can expect relief from long queues.

At the Expo site, the proportion of toilet seats for male and female in one detached toilet will be 1:2.2 or 1:2.5 while 1:0.5 in pavilions (equipped with two squat toilets and one urinal in men's room, and two squat toilets in ladies' room).

Portable toilets will meet the urgent needs in the heavily crowded areas. "They drive away as soon as they grow beyond capacity," Zhou said.

There are more than 10 such portable toilet vehicles in the city, one third of which will be used at the Expo site.