That’s a relief (if you’re a construction worker, anyway)

I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid events where I have to use a porta-potty. Yuck on yuck. All using a porta-potty does for me – other than instill the level of fear and loathing generally earmarked for an approaching clown, and provide a modicum of relief, bladder-edition – is remind me, yet again, why I’m extremely happy to live in the world of indoor plumbing. Give me a clean toilet, behind a closed door, and toilet paper (as opposed to a page from the Montgomery-Ward catalog, or a leaf – watch out for poison ivy – or a dried up corncob). You can have that Little House on the Prairie experience, thank you very much.

Seriously, I’d rather go behind a bush. Or maybe even in front of a bush. The tradeoff between privacy and the ghastly look, feel, and smell of the average porta-potty, well…peek away.

I am, of course, not talking about those upscale, shiny white portable sanitation facilities that show up at higher-end functions. Sure, they’re portable, but they’re not cesspits. No, I’m talking about those blue, green, red, whatever brightly-colored plastic jobbies that get rolled out for major events. And at construction sites.

An aside: a few years ago, I was in Arizona, and saw billboards – complete with shamrock on their logo -  for a company called Diggins Environmental Services. I noticed this because my late husband’s name was Diggins, and I was wondering how these very likely distance relatives were servicing the environment. Well, look no further than the Diggins porta-potty I spied on a building site in Tucson.

Perhaps if I profited from the porta-potty biz, I’d be more benevolently disposed towards this form of waste disposal. But that is not the case.

However, some folks do make money on porta-potties, and some of them are the ones servicing construction sites in the Boston area.

For those who haven’t been to Boston in a while, we’re something of a small-b boomtown. Lots of high rises rising high downtown, especially in the Seaport district. Office buildings, hotels, luxe condo and rental buildings. Same deal in Cambridge. I recently passed through the Alewife area, where I worked for throughout the 1990’s. In those days, there were a couple of office buildings, some public housing, a couple of strip malls, and a mega T station. Those strip malls and the T station are still there, but there are all sorts of office and apartment buildings up and going up.

All this construction translates into heightened demand for places for all the construction workers to relieve themselves.   

In a curious but inevitable byproduct of the city’s epic construction boom, the market for portable toilets is on fire. New vendors are popping up, older ones are expanding, and big companies have swooped in — all fighting for an ever-larger slice of the surprisingly lucrative porta-potty pie.

Call it Boston’s own game of thrones, complete with price wars, turf battles, and seemingly endless demand. (Source: Boston Globe)

For some of the companies, the growth has been pretty incredible.

In just a decade, the Throne Depot grew from 26 units to 2,100 (“500 of which the company acquired just last year”). Flush Services has had months where they needed to add 150 toilets to their inventory. And over the last couple of years, more and more companies have been entering what – let’s face it – seems like a pretty crappy business. But a much needed and required one.

With national labor regulations recommending at least one toilet for every 20 construction-site workers — and with some large-scale projects requiring as many as 500 on-site johns — it’s not exactly a surprise that the phones keep ringing.

I don’t know about those numbers. Is there really a construction project in Boston large enough that 10,000 hard-hats are working on it? At the height of its construction, the Pentagon had 15,000 construction workers hammering away, but that was over 3 shifts. I think someone may be a bit math-challenged here. Or maybe I lack the imagination that can conjure up 10,000 construction workers on one building site.Even this big old building going up in the Seaport, which looks like it’s supporting a few toilets per floor.

Despite the demand, it’s tough to be on the supply side:

The industry, those in the business say, can be inherently tough. Finding workers willing to spend their days cleaning out portable toilets is a predictably difficult task.

Not to mention that, when those portable toilets aren’t cleaned out well and often enough, porta-potty companies have to deal with a boatload – see, I can resist the urge to write “shitload” – of complaints.

And bad things can happen to good (if there is such a thing) porta-potties:

Locally, vendors report portable toilets that have been graffitied, tipped over, blown up, set aflame, and — in one instance — chain-sawed through. A couple years back, [Throne Depot’s Michael] Cormier said, he rented out five porta-potties for a fund-raising event in Newton. When an employee arrived later to pick them up, he found that one had been burned to the ground. The other four had simply vanished.

“To this day,” he said, “we have no idea what happened to them.”

Hmmmm. I get that four would have “simply vanished.” My guess is that, with a paint job and some new signage, they became the basis for a porta-potty startup. But “burned to the ground”? That would take some doing.

Guess the fund-raising events I go to are a bit more staid. And I tend to avoid the ones that include porta-potties.

But nice to know that business is booming for those with the stomach and olfactory toughness to enter the porta-potty business.