ReportLah!

Meet the team

Team members: Benecia Tang (Business, Analytics/Research), Bernard Heng (Product Design), Pawandeep Sekhon (Software Engineer/Product Manager)

Problem statement

Numerous initiatives aimed at improving public toilet cleanliness were implemented as early as 1983. However, a 2023 SMU study (with over 9,400 Singaporeans interviewed) revealed that two-thirds of Singaporeans perceive local hawker centre and coffee shop toilets to be as dirty or even dirtier than in 2020.

Currently, Clean Dream Crew (CDC) spoke with stakeholders in the scene and found that there is a lack of communication and knowledge on the baseline standards of how 'clean' a toilet should be. Moreover, stakeholders are also unclear on the exact nature of the challenges in toilet cleanliness, and are ill-equipped to develop targeted solutions.

For example, ABC* coffeeshop remains unclear on the exact standards of toilet cleanliness mandated by Singapore Food Agency (SFA) - the main agency governing public toilets in coffeeshops. ABC continues to rely on the ad-hoc recommendations by SFA when issues were identified, which do not always help improve cleaning operations. In one instance, rubber mats requested by SFA made toilet cleaning even more arduous.

ABC* is renamed for their privacy.

Proposed solution

To support this, the Clean Dream Crew (CDC) will develop a Data Ecosystem that identifies key baseline aspects of coffeeshop toilet cleanliness, and support stakeholders such as coffeeshop owners, cleaners, toilet goers, Public Hygiene Council, and other institutions to capture the key data that will help them tackle the issue.

For the space of the hackathon, CDC will focus on developing an accessible, in-person data collection mechanism that crowdsources toilet goers' feedback on whether the toilets are clean. This live data will in turn will be translated into actionable insights on a dashboard that will (1) notify cleaners on when toilets urgently need to be clean; (2) track what toilet goers consider to be minimally clean; and (3) inform toilet goers on the issues their toilets face and how they can help.