Flush with success

Selling ad space on waterless urinals is proving a win-win model for Teo Borschberg (right), his business partner and their clients. provided to Shanghai star

Two 'conscious entrepreneurs' from Europe are saving the city's water supplies by advertising to people with their pants down. Matt Hodges heads to the gents to learn more.

Switzerland's Teo Borschberg and Belgium's Pierre Rousseaux are busy saving the world — one urinal at a time.

Ever rushed to the gents at M1NT, Diva or Café des Stagiaires, unzipped your pants and looked down to see videos of ring girls in bikinis, or perhaps a commercial for personal driver app Uber or Cristiano Ronaldo's CR7 underpants?

If so, you've also played your part in helping to conserve water supplies, and you can thank Borschberg and his business partner for the free entertainment.

The two entrepreneurs have drafted an environmentally friendly, and potentially very lucrative, business model that they claim will save Shanghai 100 million liters of water a year by mid-2015. And this could be just the tip of the iceberg.

"We basically sponsor waterless urinals for landlords, and in exchange get the right to advertize in their washrooms," says Borschberg, an acolyte of John Mackay and Raj Sisodia's book Conscious Capitalism. He even reserves free ad space for NGOs.

In a country where per-capita water resources are around 25 percent of the global average, such "conscious" or "impact" entrepreneurship is a step in the right direction.

The company now focuses on bars, clubs and restaurants, targeting the top 10 percent of earners/consumers with tailor-made campaigns.