It’s true! Our industry is responsible for saving over 125 million gallons of fresh drinking water each day. Put in a more personal way, if you were to let your garden hose run 24/7 for 23 years, it would equal 125 million gallons based on 10 gallons per minute!
If we’re ever going to change the way people think about portable restrooms, this is the type of information we need to share with our customers and the public. Of course, we can continue to remain silent and allow the general public and our customers to continue to believe the worst about a portable restroom, but what does that do to us?
In very simple terms, it lessens our value as a service. It is hard to earn a fair living when customers can’t see the big picture, which is how important our services are to the community they live in.
Think about your conversations with customers and potential customers. Are you doing anything to elevate their opinion about our industry? It may seem unnatural at first, but I would suggest you try it. Tell them about the water savings so they understand that each time someone uses the portable restroom on their job site or at an event it saves about 2 gallons of drinking water.
If you are talking to an event organizer, estimate the number of times people will use their portable restrooms over the length of the event. Take that number and multiply it by two gallons and tell them what the number is. In most cases, it will equal a fairly large water savings. It will probably surprise them and all of a sudden you look like a “green” company instead of ugly brown.
Personally, I believe we could all use some additional information about the value of our services to the community. As I mentioned in the last PSAI News column, bad news makes headlines and because our industry is alive and well in North America, you don’t read stories about waste contaminating our water supplies. That alone proves how important our industry is to the communities we serve.
Let’s not remain silent. We can and should change the way people look at our industry. In the end, it will reduce the amount of people trying to devalue your service in order to reduce their fees.
