September 19, 2005 The P-Mate is disposable paper device which enables women to urinate easily while standing up. It is in common usage in Europe since launching four years ago and is marketed as a convenient, hygienic, portable, leak proof, discreet, no-brain solution to the bad sanitary and problematic circumstances which continually confront women, particularly at mass gatherings. The P-Mate has become an entrepreneurial success story in Holland where Moon Zijp conceived the P-Mate while traveling in Indonesia, designed it at the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam and commercialised it to national and global acclaim as a clever solution to the long queues and dirty toilet seats with which women are so often confronted with in daily life. That’s Moon at right demonstrating her invention on Dutch National television, one of many performances which caused a lot of gaiety and attention during the P-Mate’s launch period.
The European culture has embraced the P-Mate – after all, it has mature outlook to basic bodily function, based on centuries of experience learning to adopt practical technologies to facilitate large numbers of people in small spaces.
In the five years since it began, P-Mate has expanded its horizons and now markets a range of urination solutions based on the global need upon which the original premise was based.
One of these is an ingenious mobile urinal designed to eliminate queuing at public events. The plastic semi permanent urinal is very efficient in enabling large numbers of people to urinate and is hence a common fixture at public events, parties, festivals, fairs, and entertainment centres.
By offering a combination of its two products, the idea was to eliminate queuing and the results in Europe are very encouraging. In some jurisdictions, the provision of these high-throughput toilets has become mandatory in ensuring a festival is efficiently run and hygienically responsible.
The Kros unit serves 4 men (or P-Mate users) at a time and holds 450 litres before requiring emptying. Practice in Europe equates this to more than five hours of continuous usage by four people. Emptying takes only a few minutes using a standard tank truck or it can be connected to the sewerage system for a permanent solution.
It’s also extremely mobile as it weighs only 85 kg empty, and can easily be hoisted from or onto a truck with the help of the steel eye connected to the top. The Kros sells for US$1500 for a four bay urinal.
SmallWorld is also offering branded P-Mates for distribution at festivals and concerts, “where they can be given away with a sponsors name printed on them.”
The free, sponsored P-Mate has been very successful in Europe for marketers, and given that you don’t buy beer, you only rent it, there’s got to be an opening there for one of the big beer brands!
The official P-Mate site can be found here, and P-Mate is distributed in a number of countries outside mainland Europe, including the UK, Canada and Australia.