Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/831315
W EEKLY EDITION MAY 31, 2017 Member News: The Poop Scoop on Festival Season features PSAI Member Service Sanitation …continued By Leor Galil as provided to the Chicago Reader, May 24, 2017 Woodstock supplied a mere 600 toilets for what turned out to be nearly 500,000 people, according to a 2009 article published by the nonprofit magazine Consumer Reports — to put that in perspective, Service Sanitation currently recommends one toilet per 100 people as a rule of thumb. It was more than crowds that flooded Max Yasgur's farm in 1969. After Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in late 1970, a group of porta - potty business owners launched the PSAI to provide independent guidance to their peers and potential customers. Karleen Kos, executive director of the PSAI, says almost 99 percent of U.S. residents have access to indoor plumb ing, which means they mostly use porta - potties in one of three scenarios: on a worksite, in the aftermath of a natural disaster, or at a special event like a concert. Kneiszel has noticed that the proliferation of large outdoor events has caused some comp anies to change their strategy. "A lot of these companies have turned around — they will tell me that 20 years ago it was 80 percent construction sites, where they'd just drop off one at a house," he says. "Now some of them are the opposite: 80 percent event work and 20 percent construction work." The growth in event work isn't exclusively from concerts — outdoor weddings have created new demand for fancier portable restrooms — but for Service Sanitation, live music is the biggest piece of that pie. Kay oversees special events for the company, and he's noticed more and more of it over the past five years. "Of the special - event market that we handle in Chicago, I would say approximately 50 percent of that is music related," he says. Service Sanitation is a regiona l business, but it's so dominant here that its reputation extends beyond the midwest. "They're one of the biggest in the U.S.," Kneiszel says. According to Steve Dykstra, who left his job as the company's marketing manager while I was researching this arti cle, the early history of Service Sanitation is a bit hazy. Kay says the company was founded in 1967, but that's as specific as anybody can get. To explain Service Sanitation's dominance, it's more helpful to begin with its acquisition by waste and recycl ing company Homewood Disposal in 2001. At that point Service Sanitation began to grow quickly, in part by buying its competitors. Service Sanitation's site lists more than a dozen businesses it's purchased, many with dad - joke names such as Nature Calls and LepreCan. Today the company has branches in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and (as of last month) Lafayette, Indiana. "To handle that larger service area, you need to have more of a corporate presence," Dykstra says. "We offer a little bit better service to our customers, really trying to stress that — trying to provide cleaner toilets, faster efficiencies, GPS tracking." Empty Bottle Presents talent buyer Brent Heyl has been using Service Sanitation for the past couple years at two EBP events: the single - day fes tival Music Frozen Dancing and the Beyond the Gate series in Bohemian National Cemetery. (EBP also books Do Division, West Fest, and the Pilsen Food Truck Social, but Criterion Productions handles the porta - potties at those.) Heyl likes working with Servic e Sanitation because it's such a low - maintentance relationship. "If the event is looking to be larger than what I initially anticipated, I've never had an issue increasing an order — they've been fast on response time," he says. "It's more expensive than I r ealized before I started doing it," he says. "But it's a necessary service." P AGE 9 CONTINUED ON PAGE 10