What happens when you’re on someone else’s massive property, in the middle of nowhere, 300 feet above the ground, and nature calls?
It’s not something a lot of workers may think about — until they have to think about it.
Thankfully, Brief Relief is a company that has put a great deal of thought into this leg-crossing predicament, and it has come up with a few solutions.
“We’re a manufacturer of a field restroom system, mostly designed for mobile work crews, anyone working outside who find themselves with the lack of a proper restroom facility,” said Pete Lindemann, Brief Relief’s national sales manager.
More often than not, outside workers often run the risk of using unapproved containers, which can cause legal problems and public relations nightmares.
To stop those problems in their tracks, the company has made the Brief Relief system.
“Our most popular product is called Brief Relief,” Lindemann said. “It’s a disposable urinal pouch.”
The Brief Relief is basically a bag with a wide opening containing a mix of polymers and enzymes in the bottom similar to a disposable diaper.
“The polymers draw the water out of the urine and help break it down, so it’s treated waste,” Lindemann said. “It gels instantly, so it’s treated in a gelled state, and you can simply close it up and dispose of it in any trash receptacle, just like a disposable diaper. And now it’s legal to throw away.”
The products offered by Brief Relief have been well received by industries that have workers out in the field, and it’s been a natural progression to introduce the wind industry to this useful product, according to Lindemann.
“We started off with telecom companies, and built on from there to electric utilities, gas utilities, the military, construction companies, anybody who works outside,” he said. “We had a few accounts, and we knew reading about wind power, how much it was growing over the last couple of years.”
At the recent AWEA WINDPOWER show in Anaheim, Brief Relief received a lot of interest, Lindemann said.
“In the past, what we had gathered was that techs were bringing up empty bottles to take care of waste, because you’re not going to climb down from 200 feet up, and they thought it was a great product they could stick in their pocket and take it up there and then come down at the end of the day with the used bags,” he said.
But wind technicians aren’t the only ones who find the product useful. Landowners where wind farms are built also find Brief Relief’s products a way to keep their property clean.
“The actual land owners of the wind farms don’t want anything left behind,” Lindemann said. “We call them white flowers (loose pieces of toilet paper stuck in the field).”
And if additional privacy is an issue, Brief Relief also offers quickly deployed shelters, which, when used in tandem with Brief Relief’s Disposa-John Portable Restroom Bags, allow for the proper disposal of solid waste, according to Lindemann.
“We do have a privacy shelter, which is a nice all-enclosed system that integrates a tent,” he said. “You can erect the shelter in about two minutes and take it down in the same amount of time.”
Ease of use as well as the ease of erecting it often makes it a better choice to the standard portables found at parks and concert venues, according to Lindemann.
“Portables are good as a long-term solution,” he said. “The biggest cost of a portable is relocating it, having it brought out and serviced. With our product, you can deploy it yourself. You can put everything in a dufflebag, and deploy it anywhere you want. It’s been to the base camp at Mount Everest. It’s been all over the world. So if you have a short duration job or a job that is hard to get to, you can deploy our system quite easily. It’s a much cleaner, much more hygienic environment.”
For more information, go to briefrelief.com
