Fast Emptying of the Trash/Bin

Can anyone tell me if there is a quick way to empty the Trash bin when there is a lot of data in it and it takes a long time to empty ? I deleted a lot of data today and it went to trash, so I clicked through to empty it and nearly 4 hours later there was no sign of it finishing having deleted 700,000 items. This problem has happened before under exactly the same circumstances of deleting lots of unneeded back-up files. I need to be able to zap the entire trash can in seconds or even minutes but not hours. Any ideas please ?