Portable Toilet Manufacturer: A short History about the Portable Restroom Industry.

Portable restroom manufacturing, or the portable sanitation industry as it is preferably described got its start in the early part of the nineteen hundreds. Prior to that there was no such thing as a portable restroom manufacturer or renter supplying the sanitation needs of the populace.

The portable sanitation industry was born by entrepreneurial individuals who saw a need emerging after the great wars.   In Europe just after the conclusion of World War I sanitation shacks began appearing on new constructions sites where homes and businesses were being rebuilt after the losses due to the years of war.   There is little evidence In the United States that anything existed like that on construction sites. The US was still relatively rural during the years following the return of the four million plus servicemen who were looking to start families after WWI.  There was no reconstruction in the US and most of the men returned to the farms and used the popular outhouse. The sanitation shacks of Europe were nothing more elaborate than wooden structures, which contained crocks, or bowls that became known as thunder jugs or night bowls that could be used and then emptied by the honey dippers on their rounds. Land was less valuable in the United States and thus a hole in the ground was much more affordable than utilizing honey dippers. Additionally after the construction, holes could be filled in with no one ever the wiser.

Things changed greatly after World War II.  Between the years of nineteen forty-six and nineteen fifty more than sixteen million US men returned home from World War II and looked to get a piece of the good life by marrying and settling down.  By the middle of the twentieth century, the US was moving from an agricultural to an industrial and service nation and the vast majority of these servicemen settled not on the farms as they had following World War I, but in the suburbs of cities.  Because of the urban nature of this settlement the sanitation problem became one of location of the toilet and this prompted the early US entrepreneurs to resolve the problems associated with workers on constructions sites in sub-divisions and in cities. What you could get away with in rural settings, you could not get away with in cities.

The first examples of true portable sanitation or portable toilets in the US grew out of the sanitation shack of Europe.   When early US environmental rules began to forbid pit type outhouses on construction sites, some early founders of the portable toilet industry simply took the basic outhouse and put it on skids and placed half of a fifty-five gallon drum beneath the seat inside. These early pioneers of the Portable Sanitation Industry – the first Portable Toilet Manufacturers and renters, most probably one in the same - sold the idea to the construction supervisor or homeowner whereby they would place the facility on their site and then service it on a regular basis.  The customers soon began to realize that it would pay for itself just from preventing his employees leaving his site to find a toilet facility.  

The early entrepreneurs in the portable sanitation industry used any method they could to transfer the waste material from the portable outhouse to a farm and spread it. Many examples have come down to us over the years of their initial ideas such as truck engine vacuum being used to pump and aircraft shipping containers being used to hold the materials collected for transport.  There were no suppliers in those days to meet their needs, so they had to be creative. From these roots have sprung the existent modern industry that today consists of Portable Toilet Manufacturers and distributors, Truck and Tank makers, manufactures and distributors of Toilet Chemicals and all the associated items needed for the industry. 

It seems, with the few articles and stories that were news of the day, the state of the industry remained fairly stagnate until the middle to late nineteen fifties.  By then it was obvious that there was a need for many more portable toilets so businessmen began to take notice.  

Since wood was relatively cheap in the United States and available year around in every location, most of the portable, skid-mounted units were constructed of it.  The design changed little but became much more professional and easier to transport.  Some changes were made in the basic design including vents, screens, securable doors, and the quality of the holding tanks.  

The tanks gradually changed from crude metal tanks to works of art.  New materials developed after WW II and new methods of manufacturing became available which the industry and portable toilet manufactures in particular embraced with open arms. Plastics, in particularly polyethylene and fiberglass became available and holding tanks fairly quickly changed from metal to these new plastics.   The hardy wood that the industry started with remained prevalent as the cabin material up to and including the late seventies or early eighties in some places.  

Wood enjoyed a long life as the cabin for the holding tanks because it remained a relatively inexpensive building material, nearly anyone could fabricate it, and with some sandpaper and a coat of new paint, it looked and smelled like a brand new unit.  By the end of the nineteen seventies the excessive weight and the labor that it took to maintain wooden portable toilets caused portable sanitation companies to change over the cabin to polyethylene and fiberglass, a less costly, lighter weight and in the case of polyethylene, a material requiring no maintenance.

There are now five large companies manufacturing, selling and distributing plastic portable toilets in the United States, each producing tens of thousands of units annually.  Additionally there are several large companies in Europe and many smaller and niche portable toilet manufactures worldwide.

Naming of toilet facilities and services:

During WW II many of the sixteen million plus US service personnel were stationed in the orient witnessed how the Orientals handled their sanitation needs.  The homes there had a receptacle that drained into a benjo ditch that drained the waste from inside to outside your home.  A worker, known in the Orient as a honey dipper, would come along and dip out the human waste and place it in containers on a horse drawn cart, known as the honey wagon, and then sloppily transport it to a local agricultural site where it would be emptied into a pit and left until it fermented enough to be spread as fertilizer.

America’s outhouse: Before American homes and businesses had internal plumbing the external toilet facility was called by many names, but the most common was “the Outhouse.” Over the years many additional names arose including Privy, Biff or Biffy, Necessary house or Nessy, Chapel of Ease or Comfort Station, Loo – still a favorite in the UK, Wood Pile, Latrine, Uncle John or John, Jake, Rosebush, Backhouse, Sears Booth, Dooley- now a favorite in Australia, Reading Room, Library, Throne or Throne Room, White House, Eleanor, Roosevelt Monument and of course the proverbial Shithouse. 

During Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency the WPA was formed to make use of the many people out of work during the Great American Depression, one of the many projects these men did was build outhouses for the residents of rural America.  The homeowner paid for the materials -$17 – the labor was provided free.   Eleanor was Roosevelt’s wife and was very influential in the program.

The typical outhouse was of simple construction, merely a hole in the ground with a building, either plain or even elaborate, built up around it.  The more progressive homeowners would perhaps treat the hole with a coating of lime occasionally, but that was the state of sanitation for hundreds of years. Today you rarely see the old outhouse anymore and when you do they are quite dowdy.

One infamous name America attached to both indoor and outdoor toilets requires us to travel back to England in the year 1836, and discuss a man by the name of Thomas Crapper, an early plumber by trade. Tom owned three plumbing supply and repair businesses and a factory.  A gentleman that worked for him by the name of John Harington is credited with inventing the original water closet. Queen Elizabeth, who supposedly had a very sensitive nose, had a water closet made at Thomas Crapper’s factory, The Marlboro’ Works, and had it installed in her palace at Richmond. It proved a momentous success.  

It seems, contrary to poplar opinion, Thomas Crapper didn’t invent the WC but he dis have the insite and wherewithal to manufacture and promote it. Probably the most important thing about Thomas Crapper is that he initiated sanitary reform. Until the day of Thomas Crapper, anyone in the business discretely situated himself in hidden places and didn’t talk about his trade in public. Imagine the fuss in the Victorian age when Thomas Crapper opened a flamboyant location on the King’s Road, directly opposite Royal Avenue, with bright red paint and water closets prominently displayed in his showroom windows for the entire world to see.  Thus began the genesis of a professional image for the emerging industry and which gave us the beginnings of a proud tradition of working within the sanitation industry as purveyors of sanitation service or as portable toilet manufactures or renters.

The now pervasive naming of a toilet or water closet as a Crapper stems from World War I American soldiers passing through England on their way to the war front. They saw the words “T. Crapper Ltd, Chelsea” printed on the tanks and coined the slang “crapper” meaning toilet.  

Lance Hampel and Kevin Gralton, Magazine Editor, discuss Portable Toilet Manufacturing at Hampel Corp

Lance how and why did you get started in the portable restroom manufacturing business

Three unrelated events led to that. First, many years ago –too many to remember exactly when- and long before we were in the portable restroom business Hampel was asked by the largest portable toilet manufacturer to quote making some parts for them we did not end up doing business with them but it planted a seed. Secondly a local Renter with fiberglass units approached us about molding a plastic unit  -we did some preliminary designs and quoted several hundred units, he loved the design and the unit price but hadn’t anticipated the tooling cost so nothing ever happened but another seed was planted. Then lastly after adding more than enough manufacturing capacity came the fateful day I met Tom Edwards.
First though Kevin let me tell you a little about Tom Edwards and the history of the portable restroom models Hampel Corp manufactures that date back to 1988 - a total of 16 years.
Tom Edwards, is a Northeast Portable Restroom Industry veteran – he’s been at it since 1974, 30 years – he has sold for other portable toilet manufactures, provided software, manufactured pump trucks and supplies the portable restroom renters accessories like suction pipe. Tom also owned a portable restroom rental company he started in 1977 that he has now turned over to his family. Well, back in 88 Tom designed a unique looking polyethylene portable toilet  that had clapboard looking walls - he named it the Shed. The product was well acceptance in the Northeast and he sold thousands of units. But because Tom was not in the plastic molding business and had to purchase the components he was at the mercy of his suppliers to provide technological innovation and provide consistently good quality and delivery; which they ultimately failed to provide. Fortunately Hampel and Edwards were put together by a Shed loving customer of Toms, and it wasn’t long before Hampel began molding the units and soon took over sales and distribution. To this day Tom continues to provide guidance to us and is now Hampel’s NE Sales and distribution Representative

So that’s how the Shed got started how about the Country Classic and the Global models

The Country Classic owes its existence to the hundreds of customer that loved the look of the Shed but hated the difficulty of cleaning the interior of the unit with all of it’s ridges and valleys, and you know they were right. Our goal was to develop very durable unit that would look good in natural settings, upscale neighborhoods and at very special events.

So the Country classic is the first portable toilet designed by Hampel.

Yes and we employed a level of detail and technology learned in the other areas of our business that raised the bar for the industry. The Country Classic was the first plastic portable restroom in the market that had completely smooth interior walls, a really attractive wood grain exterior and an opaque roof. The opaque roof enhanced it’s classic styling and as a bonus, by eliminating the hot house effect of a translucent roof, which, coupled with the double wall construction that insulates the walls, the Country Classic became the coolest unit on the market – temperature wise that is. This is a real selling point, our customers – the operators- use the coolness to get a premium price for rental of the unit. There were other innovations for the industry introduced on the Country Classic like the Heavy-duty door handle, which by the way we have never had to replace one of, and of course the patented corner extrusions that add styling, simplify assembly and ease handling and strapping.

Lance I know you got some flak for the old fashioned – moon in the door - outhouse look of the Country Classic. What was that all about?

 Well there are a few places in the country that evidently our detractors feel don’t hold the classic or nostalgic look near or dear to their heart. I personally don’t believe that or we would not have the PT Cruiser, new Ford Thunderbird or be building Victorian or for that matter any other classically styled homes or buildings. The Retro look is definitely in. The Country Classic is a steady seller and there are many thousands of units in the market. Our best Country Classic customer has 550 units, in Texas, and his primary market is construction. He decided to enter a mature market and rather than lowering prices to gain entry he offered the Country Classic as an alternative – in was a Classic shoe in – no pun intended.

 Ok what about the Global, I understand there was some foreign influence with that model.

The Global unit owes it’s existence to our customers that had the Sheds or Country Classics and requested we manufacture a portable restroom incorporating the ruggedness and longevity of the Country Classic in a mainstream appearing portable that was more economical and applicable to the construction market.  The final encouragement came at a Nashville show when a German company that was impressed by the engineering and detail of the Country Classic approached us to joint venture in the development of a mainstream unit. That company, Global Fliegenschmidt, had a unit named Global. To make a long story short, we blended the European styling of the German Global and put the time tested Country Classic roof and other design advances on it and viola! the Global portable toilet.

For months Hampel ran an add showing a big guy hanging on the door of a Global. What’s important about that?

While designing the Global it was obvious to me that the door and its frame is the second most important part of a portable restroom –the tank is obviously first. We simply had to design a door and frame that would withstand considerable abuse, always close tightly, never warp and be maintenance free.  The only possibility was a Uniframe design - the first and only one-piece frame in the US. Put simply the doorframe is one piece, continuous, no seams. That includes a section under the door. What this does for our customers is stop the misfiting door issues due to bent Aluminum or weak seamed plastic frames which allow the portable toilets to rack. Racking is what happens when you put a portable restroom on an uneven surface or damage it in some way so the unit goes out of square causing the door not to fit. This simply doesn’t happen with the Global – and it saves our customers a lot of money in replacement costs and service calls.

Lance with the introduction of your new plastic base you seem to be continuing as one of the most innovative portable toilet manufacturers out there. What is the engine behind those innovations?

Hampel’s expertise in the many markets it has served over the last 28 years is why we have been able to introduce so many positive changes and innovations into the Portable Sanitation Industry. Take for example the new lightweight base you mentioned. The idea for that product comes from our knowledge of the issues our customers’ face –difficult to clean floors and poor ventilation – with our expertise supplying shipping pallets to our demanding Industrial customers. The result is a truly unique –we have applied for a patent- toilet base that is sweeping the industry. Its open grid work allows all the dirt and drips to fall right through – even the toughest Georgia red clay. It also provides more air intake for ventilation than any other portable restroom. The result is a unit that is much easier to clean and our customer’s customers will prefer its more comfortable environment. As added bonuses are the diagonal stake down holes, the thick replaceable ware plates on the bottom and of course it is lightweight – around 40 pounds. Another nice thing is that it fits most of our competitor’s units - and we’re selling lots of them for that purpose.

Why is lightweight so important in a Portable Restroom what about the wind?

Kevin I guess the short answer to your question would be easier handling. If your job was slinging around portable restrooms all day you would rather have them weigh 170 pounds rather than 200 or 230 like some units. There is an interesting anecdotal story the goes with that question. Three years ago at Nashville we did a written survey of about 150 of our customers. One of the questions we asked addressed that subject. “Do you think a Portable restroom should be heavy, to resist tipping in the wind or by vandals, or lightweight to ease handling” or something like that. When we tallied up the answers it was 70% for the light and 30% for heavy. I was in the process of developing the new base at the time and needed the answer. Well 70/30 isn’t unanimous enough to go either way so we designed it to be both – light as manufactured, or heavy by providing iron weights to add the 35 or so pounds we took out of the old composite base. Here’s the interesting part- now after one year of production, thousands and thousands and thousands of units, no one has purchased the weights. I suppose it could be because you can achieve the same stability, or better, by staking down the unit or by simply adding four or so extra gallons of water to the tank.

Lance you’ve told us about the history of Hampel’s portable restroom manufacturing business and you’ve mentioned other Customers you have. Tell us a little about Hampel and what else you do

I started Hampel Corp in January if 1976.  29 years ago after spending 7 years as the chief engineer and then VP of another plastics company.  Hampel got started in the custom business – making parts for other companies. Our first customer was International Harvester; we made a custom plastic tray for them to hold 5 different models of crankshafts. That was the beginnings of our Reusable Packaging Division.  Our second and third large customers were John Deere and Harley Davidson. We made the rear grass bagger cover for a Deere lawn tractor and the complete front fairing for Harleys early touring bike. That was the beginning of our Custom Division. You know Kevin we still provide parts to all three of those customers – we must be doing something right! As a matter of fact we are one of a very small group of only 120 suppliers out of a total of 21,000 Deere suppliers to achieve Partner status – that’s the best quality, delivery and pricing rating you can get. That’s what you call customer satisfaction. And that’s how we have managed to keep those customers all these years.

As we toured the plant I saw hundreds of the little white plastic hutches you called Calf-tel’s what’s the story with them?

That’s one of the products of our Agricultural division, which got started in 1980 manufacturing calf shelters for dairy farmers. When you ride around Wisconsin or for that matter anywhere in the world where there are dairy cows you see our product, Calf-tel. In all we have produced nearly 300,000 of them. If you lined them up end to end it would be a line over 300 miles long. And you know what Kevin? More than 99% of all those 300,000 Calf-tel’s, including the earliest ones made over 20 years ago, are still in service- we build em to last. Oh by the way, the Global and Country Classic portable restrooms we manufacturer, sell and distribute are built of the same material, High Molecular Weight Polyethylene.

Well that’s not good for your replacement business is it?

Kevin, when Hampel gets into any business, including portable restroom manufacturing it is to build and sell a finished unit, not to be in the replacement parts business- that’s a pain in the butt for both our customers and us. We absolutely design a unit with long life as a goal. To put real meaning into that statement Hampel has the only “what ever the cause” lifetime guarantee on the most commonly broken portable restroom parts in the industry, the door handle, our new double torsion door spring, the door hinge rod and the corner extrusions.

Lance, You’re really hands on at Hampel what exactly is your role?

Well Kevin other than the traditional leadership and administrative functions any CEO has to do I am deeply involved in the creation of the products that Hampel provides. I’m also very much involved in sales and marketing – they both go hand in hand. Anyone who attends the Nashville show realizes how I mix with the customers – it is there and when I go into the field that I learn what the customers like and don’t like. Armed with that knowledge and my 35 years of engineering and plastic processing background and presto another innovation! I guess you could call me an inventor. I don’t do the final designing we have a staff of really good guys that does that. I get the fun part conceptualizing – you know the napkin drawings- they get the tough part - making all the pieces fit together and taking care of the details.

Since Hampel entered the portable toilet market you’ve introduced several pretty innovative products and features tell us about them?

The most innovative and revolutionary product is of course the lightweight open grid base that we’ve already talked about. Another that is revolutionary but not nearly as technologically involved is the Graffiti Buster. Kevin when I say revolutionary what I mean is that as the industry learns about them – the skid and the Graffiti Buster - it will change the status quo in the industry.  The Graffiti Buster is essentially a lightweight plastic liner that is installed over the interior walls of the damaged or marked up portable restroom. There are three important features: first: the material has a very dense semi gloss surface that nothing sticks to and it wipes down very easily. Second: all three-wall panels are connected and it is creased where the corners are and the area that would be behind the tank is cut out. Third it installs very easily, take off the paper holder and urinal, push it in through the door, rivet back in the accessories and you’ve got brand new interior walls for about the price of one side panel with a lot less work. That’s revolutionary! And – I left the best part for last- when and if that gets scratched up or marred you can flip it over and use the other side because it’s reversible. By the way we make them for most of our competitors units too.

You have a lot of fascinating automated equipment out in the manufacturing plant, molding and trimming parts. What does it all do?

 The piece of equipment that is the most fun to watch out in the plant are the CNC’s and the Motoman robot.  That’s what you saw trimming and putting the holes in the Global sidewalls. It’s basically a computer programmable mechanical arm with a high-speed router motor on the end of it. It has six axis’s of motion  - about the same as a human arm – but it’s much longer, about 6’ and stronger, it can swing around a 60 pound motor with its arm fully extended. The amazing thing is the speed and accuracy that it moves with – several thousand inches a minute and it repeats itself part to part within several thousands of an inch.  That’s important to our customers because every part is made the same, so assembly is fast and less frustrating and if a part is ever damaged and needs replacing the holes will always line up. 
We also watched one of the twinsheet thermoformers – they are the primary pieces of processing equipment here at Hampel.  It’s these machines that turn the flat sheet from the extruders into a molded part. They are four station rotary machines, the big horizontal wheel that moves the plastic from station to station is 40’ in diameter, it holds 4 sheets of plastic as big as 7’ by 11’ and up to 1/2 “ thick. The process works like this; the operator loads the sheet and unloads the molded part in the first station. The plastic cycles thru the next two stations, ovens, for heating. Then the heated sheets are rotated into the molding station where a mold comes down from the top and another comes up from the bottom squeezing and sealing the sheets together at the edges, air pressure is applied to the center hollow part between the sheets and bingo! a Global door or frame. The good thing about using this process on these parts, doors and frames, is that we can put the material precisely where it is needed – thicker on the outside for better resistance to abuse and thinner on the inside to keep the weight of the toilet down. 
We show a video in our booth at Nashville every year that shows most of this equipment in action –if any show goers haven’t done so already they should stop in next year and see it. I would also invite any of your readers to stop in for a short tour if they’re ever in the Milwaukee area – we enjoy showing off our state of the art manufacturing plant!
Hampel’s process capability and 28 years of expertise - make that 35 if you throw in my experience from a previous life - allows us to produce or source all of the component parts made by the best process available. That includes thermoforming, twinsheet forming, blow molding, rotational molding, extrusion, injection molding and structural foam molding – we use them all, what ever suits the part best.

While we were on the plant tour you showed me your “pipe bomb portable” tell us about it

A little over a year ago we got an interesting call from one of our customers in Tennessee. He felt compelled to report to us just how tough our Global door really was. It was soon after we started running the “man on the door ad”. If I recall correctly the story goes like this: He put some relatively new Globals portables out in an area where some new homes were being built. The next morning he was contacted by the police or the contractor and told one of the portables had been blown apart by vandals.  What he saw upon arriving at the scene amazed him enough to call us.  There stood the unit with the three sides peeled down like a banana, but the front, complete with the door stood there like a dedicated soldier unharmed but a small hole from shrapnel. I arranged to meet him at the Nashville show a couple months later and exchange it for a new unit - I was curious about what a pipe bomb would do to one of our units. Well the truth is it didn’t do much – that unit could be reassembled; you would have to put in a new tank, the original was blown to smithereens. And you might put in a Graffiti Buster to cover the holes in the walls from the shrapnel. You know Kevin That would make an interesting ad – we’ll work on that.

What’s new for 2004 and what do you see happening in the future

Certainly one thing happening is the interiors of all the units are becoming nicer looking. At Nashville this year we introduced all new interior components – and they are color matched to the units. If the unit has a blue door than it has a blue paper holder, blue urinal, blue vent tube and blue shelf. The tank stays gray. They look very handsome and were an overwhelming success at the show. Incidentally Kevin the new 3-roll paper holder has a closed back so the paper isn’t damaged when spraying down a unit.
Our next design project is a new stylized tank that will optionally incorporate fresh and recirculating flush for our foreign and domestic customers; we expect to have it done by next season. Another area that needs attention industry wide is simplifying the assembly of the unit. We’re working on some advanced designs that should save the overall industry lots of money, but that’s still several years away and I don’t want to give away any secrets.