It’s an unfortunate reality, but vandalism is everywhere, and chances are you have already faced it before. There is no way to prevent vandalism altogether, but there are ways to reduce the occurrence.
Portable toilets are an extremely common target for these vandals, so it is important to take action to protect them. After all, it’s not only hard to remove most forms of vandalism; it also makes your property look worse as a whole. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can cut down on vandalism to your portable toilet.
Ensure Your Site Is Fenced
This is an extremely effective method of protecting your portable toilets from vandals. On enclosed construction sites, this is as easy as ensuring the unit is placed within the fencing.
Even if the fencing does not appear very secure, this can still be surprisingly effective. Very often, the simple extra step of bypassing fencing is enough to dissuade vandals who simply want an easy hit and run.
Make Them Visible
Vandals, like most criminals, aren’t interested in doing their work in front of an audience. For this reason, it is a good idea to place the portable toilet in a high traffic area. If you can place the toilet somewhere where pedestrian traffic is high, you can use the crowds as your own security force and prevent most opportunities to vandalize your toilet.
Keep It Lit
Obviously, if people are going to see the vandalism in order to prevent it, they will need some light. So, it’s important to place your portable toilet near existing lighting. Good options that can also leave your toilet visible include placing them near light posts and under floodlights located on the side of many buildings.
Lock the Doors Nightly
No matter the amount of light and visibility, if you will be leaving the portable toilets unsupervised overnight, it’s important to lock them. Otherwise, vandals will simply go inside to escape supervision. Unfortunately, this will just leave the toilet’s inside vandalized instead of the exterior.
Prevent Tipping
Graffiti is what comes to mind when most people think of vandalism. However, with portable toilets, an equally common and unpleasant option comes to mind, tipping. Tipping portable toilets to create a miniature disaster inside is a common form of vandalism and something no one is looking forward to cleaning up after.
Place portable toilets in a location that makes them difficult to push over. This could be inside a corner, next to trees or bushes, or anything else that could block the motion. Alternatively, you could affix the portable toilet to the ground. This can be done with some straps and ground stakes.
Talk With Your Workers
If you are following the above advice, and still your toilets are becoming vandalized, then part of the problem may be your own employees. Oftentimes people may not even think writing with a marker or similar defacing really is vandalism.
This means you will need to meet with your employees and let them know this is not acceptable, that this can damage the workplace’s appearance, and cost money to remove. Often times a quick talk with your employees is enough to reduce a lot of pain down the road.
Final Thoughts
Portable toilets are one of the most common targets of vandals, and the site of one covered head to toe in graffiti is common. However, your workplace does not have to suffer. Trying the above tips can help prevent most cases of vandalism and leave your portable toilets clean and graffiti-free.
Contact Us
For more information on how to keep your portable toilets looking clean and graffiti-free or to rent clean and fresh units, call Flush Services at (978) 778-8000 and connect with us on Facebook.
