SERVICES

Female Festival Urinals

Name

SheWee-inal Sanitary Services to Outdoor Events

Description

SheWee-inal is the female urinal designed for outdoor events. Quick, simple, clean and fun to use, it is the pleasant alternative to queuing for portable WCs, especially at large gatherings.  It’s also more eco-friendly.   With funnel-shaped urinating Female Urinating Devices supplied on site, women quickly master the art of urinating whilst standing up.  

Advantages of the SheWee-inal

  • Shortens queues – quicker to use than a WC
  • Clean, fresh, light and airy
  • Avoids the need to touch anything
  • Safer to use - no steps, or slip hazard
  • Child-friendly (raised platform available)
  • More space efficient than portable cabin WC
  • Uses eco-friendly materials
  • Water-saving
  • Eliminates the “blue” flushing agent
  • Lessens consumption of loo roll
  • Addresses sexual parity issues
  • A pleasant and FUN experience for women and girls
  • Design is tasteful and elegant
  • Does not need hard standing or level ground
  • Self emptying – gravity feed to external tanks
  • No (lorry-mounted) hoists required
  • Quickly and easily erected by the Supplier
  • All components are man-portable (max. 2-man lift)

Prior to 2005 when certain musical festivals introduced the popularly named “She Pee” female urinal, the default convenience for women at outdoor events (shows, fairs, musical festivals, etc.) was the typical cabin-style mobile WC, with self-contained effluent tank and a fixed supply of (blue) flushing liquid.  BS6465 recommends provision of mobile WC units for musical festivals lasting more than 6 hours, setting the minima in relation to numbers of males and females on site.  It recommends five times as many WC units for females in comparison to males simply because the males have access to urinals.

It soon became clear that provision of urinals for females should similarly reduce the loading on the WC provision.  The BS6465 provisions are just Health and Safety minima; they do purport to be sufficient to eliminate queues, least of all at times of peak demand.  In practice many organisers of large events choose to exceed the BS6465 minima, and that’s where the female urinals score.  For every 100 more WC units, as many as 80 could be said to be for urinating only.  Of those females who use them as many as 35% are happy to use a female urinal. 

Hence, on those statistics, the same functional utility gained from hiring an extra 100 mobile WC units could be gained from 74 WC units and a female urinal.  Quite apart from aesthetic and environment benefits, in financial terms that represents a saving of 28 WC units.  As women generally come to accept and expect the concept of female urinals, the saving could grow to 80 WC units per hundred. 

A key element of the female urinal concept is the ability that it affords women to urinate from a standing position.  That aids speed, which is a crucial factor when considering sanitation at large-scale events, or musical festivals where there can be bursts of very high peak demand.  Quite apart from their medical forerunners, inexpensive portable Female Urinating Devices (FUD) have been around for a couple of decades expressly for enabling women to urinate standing up at their convenience.   Manufacturers around the world are supplying both disposable and re-usable FUD in response to their growing popularity with women from the USA, Europe, and the Far East.  Festival-goers are in the vanguard.

The well-known “She/Pee” enclosure at one larger musical festival supplemented the old-fashioned trough urinal with movable, free-standing, moulded plastic urinals.  Designed, in the form of a cross, with a small trap at each of the 4 corners, they were originally intended for men.   An adaptation for female use was to add a small, hinged partition to cover the rear view.  Nevertheless, many women have voiced their disappointment with the lack of privacy. 

The physical proportions of the 4-man unit were also not female friendly; the urinal threshold is too high for many grown women.  It absolutely precludes use by any woman unless she is  standing up straight and equipped with a FUD; shorter girls cannot use it at all even with a FUD.
The Dutch designed disposable waxed cardboard P-MATEs have been supplied at popular music festivals which, in an origami-like manner, can be made up into a use-once funnel.   Designed and manufactured in the UK, the plastic Shewee funnel is becoming the de facto standard for re-usable FUD.  In any deployment of the female urinal, a supply of FUD is obligatory, whether on sale at a reasonable price, or supplied free of charge by the Event Organiser.


Based on  published Glastonbury statistics

Contact Details

RM Harris
Email: Harris481@btinternet.com
Web: www.brkh.co.uk or www.p-minus-q.co.uk
07840 267187 or 01276 686788