Technology to the rescue

Is it too late to cancel Charlestown’s beach facilities project?

By Will Collette

Remember last spring’s bitterly contested ballot over whether to invest $1.2 million in building decent sanitary facilities at our two town beaches?

Despite the strong opposition of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) which sought to get Charlestown voters to vote this bond measure down, the proposal was approved by an 11 point margin.

I wonder if the results might have been different had the CCA known about this marvelous technological advance.

The Dutch National Railway runs about 16% of its trains over very short distances and, to save money and space, does not equip short hop trains with restrooms.  

Rather than simply expect passengers to just cross their legs and hold it, the Dutch have found an ingenious solution.

Dutch National Railways spokesperson Jeroen von Geusau told the BBC that new “wee bags” would be placed on the trains for passengers in need of emergency relief. 

Made by Travel  John, the “wee bags” are a travel urinal equipped with a cup feeding into a bag filled with a substance that, when mixed with urine, turns into a gel. The bag can be sealed and simply dropped into a trash can.

This system is apparently pretty easy for men to use; women, not so much. According to the numerous accounts I read in European news sources, the Dutch are apparently only going to offer the “wee bags” and not the other products being offered by Travel John, such a the system they have for “solid” waste, or the portable commode.

You may recall that we featured a Japanese portable commode system during the beach facilities debate. The Dutch system is clearly much simpler and less expensive than the Japanese technology, a fact no doubt pleasing to the CCA’s fiscally-conservative base.

Well, ground hasn’t yet been broken on our beach facilities so it’s not too later for another CCA push to kill the project.