An inconvenient truth

When Jen Kim, a Korean-American in her 20s, went to use a public restroom inside a local cafe franchise in Ilsan two years ago, she couldn’t help but notice a trash can that was overflowing with used toilet paper that emitted an unbearable odour. 

“I left the stall immediately, telling myself I would rather hold it in and risk getting a urinary tract syndrome than use that bathroom,” she recalls.

On the door of the stall was a sign asking users not to flush toilet paper down the toilet. 

This is a common sight in Korea where public restrooms often have such signs, along with waste bins piled high with soiled toilet paper. 

It is an occurrence that has peeved American expat Michael Hurt for a long time. The research professor at Korea University has been living in South Korea since 1994. “The practice of putting one’s wastepaper into a basket is completely unhygienic and unsanitary,” he says.

“And it’s interesting that during the MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) scare recently and the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak before that, one of the points of emphasis became that of hygiene and reducing transmission of viruses and bacteria. But little thought was given to the fact that faeces smeared all over paper sitting out in open-air containers is also pretty problematic.”

Many signs in bathroom stalls explain that the water pressure of the flushing system is low. Hence patrons are asked to toss wastepaper into a bin instead. However, according to Pyo Hye-ryeong, who heads a non-governmental organisation that advocates sanitary public bathroom facilities, water pressure is rarely a cause of clogging in public bathrooms in South Korea. 

“According to our research findings, most clogging cases in public bathrooms occur because people flush random objects down the toilet, including food garbage,” says Pyo, who represents the Citizens’ Coalition for Restroom Culture. 

“Toilet paper manufactured nowadays rarely makes toilets clog because it dissolves in water in about 30 seconds.”

Random items clogging up the pipes include socks, leggings, used baby diapers and sanitary napkins. 

The practice of throwing out used toilet paper into trash cans began here in the late 1980s, after the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, according to Baek Chung-yeop, an official at the Ministry of the Interior. 

Before the Olympics here, nearly 70 percent of all public bathrooms in Seoul had squat toilets without plumbing systems, he explains. 

“The government replaced as many squat toilets with flush toilets as possible in 1988, because they didn’t want to give a bad impression to visitors during the games,” says Baek, who oversees public bathroom policies at the ministry.

Pyo from the CCRC claims the practice can be a threat to public health. She has been advocating for public bathrooms that do not have such trash cans since the 1990s. 

“Very often the trash cans are not emptied frequently enough,” she says. “Sometimes they remain piled up in a closed space for more than 10 hours. No one with any common sense can think such an environment is in any way hygienic.”

When asked by The Korea Herald about the potential health risks of such trash bins, physicians at the Samsung Medical Centre said that one’s chance of contracting an infectious disease is low, unless a person directly touches the used toilet paper. 

While Cho Eun-hee, a high-ranking official at the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agrees with these doctors, she also notes that children are particularly vulnerable in public bathrooms with piled-up wastepaper.

“Kids are curious and you never know what they might touch in stalls of public bathrooms,” says the director of infectious disease surveillance division of the KCDC. 

Lee Jang-hoon, professor at Kwangwoon University’s environmental engineering program, says trash cans are also one of the major causes of bad odours. 

Lee explained that Korean bathrooms are already vulnerable to bad odours, as more than 80 per cent of properties in Seoul use septic tanks, small-scale sewage systems that treat and dispose of household wastewater on site. In North America, only about 25 per cent of the population relies on septic tanks, mostly in rural areas that lack connection to public sewage pipes. 

The South Korean government has only started taking notice of the problem in recent years. It is gradually making changes to public bathrooms nationwide. 

In 2013, the Ministry of the Interior began removing wastepaper bins from bathroom stalls in state-run facilities. This included all Seoul subway stations along lines 5 to 9. 

The government has also begun switching its campaign from telling people not to flush anything down the toilet to telling them to only discard toilet paper. 

Seoul City Hall, the building of the Gyeonggi Provincial government and Suwon City Hall have removed all trash cans from their bathrooms. “Our ultimate goal is to remove trash cans from all public bathrooms across Seoul,” said Kim Woo-gyeom, who works in the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s public health bureau. 

Above all, Pyo from CCRC said that what South Korea needs is public decency. “The thing is, people wouldn’t flush their socks down the toilet at home, because once it clogs, they’ll have to fix it on their own,” she says.