Portable toilet rentals and business
Posted on septembre 12, 2013 by Frank
Portable toilets are used by many companies, especially in the fields of constructions and events. Actually 75% of the portable toilets are rent by construction companies and installed on building sites. It is astonishing to realize that before the 80s, some construction sites had no facilities whereas other ones were rich enough to install immobile toilets. So basically you had to wait until your lunch break to go to the next café and do your business. Why portable toilets rentals are such a big business now and how do the companies cope with competitiveness?
Customers and trends
Portable toilets or “porta potties” like we sometimes call them come from the United-States. They appeared for the first time at the end of the 70s on the construction sites to meet the request of this specific industry. Immobile toilets, contrary to portable toilets, were very expensive to install, so most of the constructions sites simply had no toilets and workers had to go to local shops and cafes to do their business. Despite many hygienic issues and recurrent disgusting problems, portable toilets are still massively rent by construction companies and they represent 75% of the customers. But with the financial crisis, this industry has been severely struck and we recorded a drop of 10% in their activities since 2009. So this is the reason why portable toilets manufacturers had to find new business opportunities, so they have been turning to events industries. Outdoor events like music festival are really prone to rent those kinds of equipment because they are convenient for them: portable toilets cost around 1000$ to produce but rentals are only around 50$ for a few days. When you have to welcome tens of thousands of visitors it is really difficult to install a sufficient amount of immobile toilets because they need plumbing whereas portable toilets only need a waste tank. Moreover when event companies rent portable toilets the price includes the transport which can be very expensive for the toilets manufacturers.
Portable toilets: complaints and innovations
But like you may know outdoor events are not always proud of their sanitary facilities. When they welcome thousands of visitors, festivals toilets look like a battlefield or an initiation rite. Everybody despairs when it is time to go to the toilets because hygiene in stand portable toilets is usually suffocating. Porta potties rentals may be cheap, they also prompt a lot of complaints. This is the reason why new sanitary solutions appear. Most of the time those innovations come from the transport industries and you find now the same technologies in the plane and in some construction sites or top-of-the-range outdoor events. The first technology is recirculating toilets. It means that the portable toilets feature a tank below as well as a flushing system. Hygiene is assured by blue chemical compounds. Those chemicals reduce the risks of contamination by eliminating germs. So they are safer but they still use a lot of water. In the most luxury portable toilets you may find recirculating systems with mirrors, ventilation systems and automatic cleaning, but the customers who are able to rent this kind of equipment are very scarce on the market. Another technology is way more appealing and becomes more and more popular. This technology is vacuum toilets. With them, the need of water is significantly reduced because wastes are aspired by a ventilation system whereas standards toilets work with gravity and you need a lot of water for that. So with vacuum portable toilets you just need chemicals and a little amount of waters. Usually they stink a lot less. However you should know that portable vacuum toilets costs a lot more, from 5000$ to 40000$ for the top-of-the-range models designed for luxury events. Meanwhile we still have to deal with standard potties by telling ourselves that it is better than a simple hole in the ground like before!