Interesting Facts

The average person in the UK goes to the toilet 2,500 times a year. (Over the course of your lifetime (assuming you live to the ripe old age of 80) that's 200,000 times! If you Google about this (go on you know you want to), you'll find a lot of web sites say you will spend 3 years on the loo. The trouble is, by my reckoning that works out at:- Supposing we live for 80 years, that's 29200 days, and we supposedly spend 1,095 days of this on the loo, that's 1,576,800 minutes on the loo, which works out at 54 minutes per day  (I'm not a mathematician so do correct me if I'm wrong).  Now I don't know about you, but I do not spend 54 minutes a day on the toilet! I wonder who worked this out.  Maybe they need to visit a doctor.) Here's what I think is more likely:- Assuming 7 visits to the loo per day, and an average of 3 minutes per visit. 21 minutes per day. 7,665 minutes per year * 80 = 613,200 minutes in a lifetime. 10,220 hours r...

No, it's not a typo, I mean Jenson Bottom (well that's her nickname). Her real name is Jolene Van Vugt and she has just set a new land speed record – on a motorised toilet. (The 31-year-old former motocross champion was performing at performing at the Nitro Circus stunt show, and she managed to speed along at 46mph – 4mph faster than the previous Guinness world record. It's people like her who make me think there's hope for us yet:- ) Source

According to  Professor Mark Wilcox, Clinical Director of Microbiology at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, whether you close the toilet lid before you flush, could have an impact on the spread of infections. (Seemingly leaving the lid up when you flush can allow a cloud of bacteria to explode into the air, settling on nearby surfaces. I won't go into the specifics, but they tested  the hospital superbug C. difficile, and  found that when flushing, bacteria was transported up to 10 inches above the toilet seat when it was open, and was found on the cistern, to the right and left of the toilet seat, and on the floor, in fact it was still detected in the air up to 90 minutes later, but when the lid was closed no C. diff. was recovered on any surface.  So, men, now you know why us women get so annoyed when you leave the lid up.) Source

According to the World Toilet Organization (yes, there is one), the average person goes to the toilet 2500 times year. (If you add it up it means that your average human spends about 3 years over their lifetime.)

In the US in 1973 there was a massive shortage of toilet paper. (Seemingly, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson joked that there was an acute shortage of loo paper, and so the next morning, 20 million people bought all that they could find. By noon, most stores were sold out.  The shortage lasted for 3 weeks.) Source: Wikipedia

According to green campaigners, damage done to the environment by America's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food and McMansions, is far outweighed by the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply toilet paper. (98% of the toilet paper used in the USA comes from virgin wood, in Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue for a soft backside. After all fluffy loo paper vs the future of the planet? No contest really.) Source: The Guardian

US researchers from the Society for Microbiology and The Soap and Detergent Association have worked out that only 77% of Americans wash their hands in public restrooms (loos to the rest of us). (This figure is down 6% on a similar study in 2005. So this is for the Americans: When washing your hands you should rub your wet, soapy hands together outside the stream of running water for at least 20 seconds, before rinsing thoroughly and then drying with a clean or disposable towel. In a public loo, after drying, use a dry paper towel to turn off the water (and open the door, if there is one).

There were 3,220 toilets at Glastonbury. (Hang on! That's only one for every 55 people. They are emptied and cleaned throughout using vacuum tankers pulled by tractors. The effluent gets pumped into a huge lagoon (doesn't that sound romantic) at the north of the site, where a machine picks out clothes, phones and other items that have been dropped. Before this separator was installed a few years ago, workers had to do the job in a boat. The waste is then transferred to 5,500-gallon tankers, which make 40 trips a day, day and night, to local sewage works. Most ends up 30 miles away at Avonmouth, on the Bristol Channel. Too much information?)

According to the National Phobics Society , four million people in the UK have phobias about toilets. (There are different words to describe this kind of phobia: Shy Bladder, Paruresis, Parcopresis. It must make daily life very awkward, although if you have used a public toilet in the UK you can understand people's alarm and as for France - well I'll admit it, I'm very afraid of French public loos - I can't go if it's one of those elephant's feet thingies. And let's face it, in America they have a phobia about the word toilet.)

On 2.5cm2 of your office desk there are 20,961 germs compared with 49 on the same area of a typical toilet seat. (The joy of WiFi is that I can ask you whether you are sitting at your desk now, or if are you surfing on the loo?)

Flushing a toilet costs, on average, 1.5p. (So, no more spending a penny.)

Toilet paper is the third biggest selling household commodity, with sales exceeding £11bn a year. (That's a lot of loo roll. For posh people 'loo roll' = 'toilet tissue')

Toilet paper was invented in 1857. (I wonder what they used before that?)