Why are event organisers demanding more sustainable toilet facilities?

When you’re out and about at an event, doing your ‘business’ is something you can’t put off until you get home.

But today’s festival goers are more eco-conscious. They want to know that the event they’re attending isn’t bad for the environment.

Event companies are also under pressure to demonstrate their commitment to running a more sustainable event, which extends to the supply chain they use.

So, like many businesses, we’ve put initiatives in place to reduce our environmental impact and help the events industry do the same. One of those initiatives is the manufacture of portable compost toilets.

What are portable compost toilets?
Portable compost toilets are an alternative to traditional flush toilets and provide an efficient and environmentally friendly way of dealing with human waste. In fact, they even turn your poo into safe compost suitable for organic farming or gardening.

How they work is very simple. Beneath the toilet seat is a mini wheelie bin with around a foot of straw within it. The straw acts as a natural filter to separate liquid from solids. Your wee trickles through the straw and travels down a pipe into a tank. Any solid waste stays in the toilet but is covered each time with sawdust. This helps to mask odours and kick-starts the composting process.

The portable compost toilets are emptied regularly, and the solid waste undergoes natural biological processes to become a valuable fertiliser. The compost produced is relatively odourless and is rich in nutrients to benefit plant life.

How are portable compost toilets more sustainable?
Portable compost toilets are a great way for businesses to become increasingly sustainable.

Here’s how:
As we all know, water is a precious natural resource, and conserving it is key. Compost toilets don’t require water because you’re not flushing waste away. And according to Severn Trent, each time you flush a conventional toilet, you use around eight litres of water.

Compost toilets are chemical-free, which is much better for the environment because they don’t pose a pollution threat.

After two years, the waste produced from compost toilets can be reused as a natural fertiliser for farming and gardening activities

Why do you manufacture your own portable compost toilets?

We build our own portable compost toilets in our Staffordshire workshop for many reasons, including:
1/ To ensure we can guarantee their quality
2/ To ensure they’re built to last
3/ To allow us to choose the recycled materials they’re made from
4/ To allow us to create configurations that make them easier to transport around the country in fewer journeys
5/ To enable us to build them around our customer’s needs

What else are you doing to become a more sustainable business?
We’re a registered waste carrier with the Environment Agency and work closely with water companies to ensure our customer’s sewage can be adequately handled at one of their treatment plants. That way, everyone can rest assured it’s not going to cause any harm to local ecosystems and waterways

Our Staffordshire headquarters has solar panels and ground source heat pumps to help us to become more energy efficient

We have a wide variety of vehicles that can handle anything from 500 gallons to 4,000 gallons of liquid waste. This means we don’t have to deploy larger tankers – which might have a more significant impact on the environment – when a small tanker will do. We use AdBlue in all our fleet to help remove toxic substances from exhaust gases. In the future, we’ll also consider adding electric vehicles to our fleet

I’m an event organiser looking for more sustainable toilet options. How can you help?
If you’re an event organiser, we’re currently building compost toilets in 3-bay pods to add to our portfolio. This means we can deliver around 27 in one load, saving fuel costs and reducing our carbon footprint.

We're the one-stop shop for all your event needs if you need to offer your eventgoers a selection of both traditional portable and compost toilets.

Our customers say: “Quite simply the best and most dedicated toilet company I have worked with.

“Lots of other toilet companies are very good but the team at Willpower genuinely want to give the best service possible.”

(Scottie McKean, Director at Background Productions Ltd)

For more information about sustainable toilets, call 0330 333 8178.