A plastic mat folded at the bottom and connected by piping to a large tank is helping to remove the unpleasant smell of urine from along much of the fencing at Roskilde Festival.
The flexible pissoir PeeFence, which has been tested as a DTU project for the past two years, is back at Roskilde Festival in 2015—this time with 195 mats to keep urine away from the fences. And it works.
The PeeFence was launched as a DTU project in 2013 and 2014. This year, PeeFence can again be found in the camping area—and on a much larger scale than in previous years. However, PeeFence is no longer part of the collaboration between Roskilde Festival and DTU. Instead, PeeFence I/S is collaborating directly with the festival organizers. It is therefore following the same path as the mobile telephone recharging service Volt, and the sustainable waste bin DropBucket—from DTU project to start-up.
Collaborating with the festival has resulted in PeeFence receiving the capital needed to produce 195 mats, which are now hanging on many of the fences at Camping East and Camping West. The agreement is based on the festival renting the mats this year and next.
The PeeFence concept is simple: A plastic mat folded at the bottom to form a gutter. The urine runs into a collector, and then flows away down a hose. This year, the students behind PeeFence have connected all the urinals in series, so that all the urine ends in a container from where it is pumped up into a large tank.
"As a DTU student, you are never completely happy with a product. You always want to develop it further. So I think the final version of PeeFence is still some way off."
Thomas Salling, Design & Innovation student at DTU and a co-founder of PeeFence
The ingenious solution has meant that along several hundreds of metres of fencing at Camping West there is no trace of the ever-growing lakes of urine which previously forced urinating festival-goers further and further away from the fencing. And what a stink!
“The area we are in now was really hard hit last year, but this year it looks and smells much better,” says Thomas Salling, a Design & Innovation student at DTU and a co-founder of PeeFence.
Development ongoing
Even though PeeFence functions as intended and serves its purpose, the students are continuing their product development. Among other things, a new collector has been designed, and they are also testing different mat thicknesses, and trying to find an optimum way of piping away the urine.
“This year, it is on such a big scale that we are able to test whether capacity matches the number of users. So we regularly walk around and ask people what they think about using the PeeFence pissoirs. We very keen to improve it on an ongoing basis. As a DTU student, you are never completely happy with a product. You always want to develop it further. So I think the final version of PeeFence is still some way off,” says Thomas Salling.
Recently, the people behind PeeFence started to consider other suitable uses for their invention. In addition to keeping the fences at Roskilde Festival almost free of urine, one of the big advantages of PeeFence is that it is easy to set up and take down again. Therefore it’s likely that PeeFence can be used at many other events where there is a temporary need for urinals.
“I think it would be ideal for large fun runs or marathons. Runners have to pee before the start, that’s just a fact, and by using PeeFence you can—in addition to draining the urine away properly—create a bit of privacy. However, we have been pouring all our energies into Roskilde Festival, so it’s something we will look at after the summer,” says Thomas Salling.
Read more about PeeFence.