A portable toilet or mobile toilet is a toilet that may easily be moved around. They may be toilets that can be brought on site, such as a festival or building site, to quickly provide sanitation services. Others may be toilets within mobile vehicles, such as boats or caravans. Some are re-usable and may be moved on to further sites, others are easily installed but become permanent once in place. A major characteristic is that most types do not require any pre-existing services to be provided on-site, such as sewerage disposal, but are completely self contained.
They can be used in a variety of situations, for example in urban slums of developing countries, at festivals, for camping, or on boats. One well-known type of portable toilets are chemical toilets, but other types exist as well, such as urine-diversion dehydration toilets, composting toilets, container-based toilets, bucket toilets, freezing toilets and incineration toilets.
A portable toilet is not connected to a hole in the ground (like a pit latrine), nor to a septic tank, nor is it plumbed into a municipal system leading to a sewage treatment plant; it can, by definition, be picked up and moved. Some portable toilets can be carried by one person, as in the main image, whereas others need heavy lifting equipment such as a truck and crane.
A chemical toilet collects human excreta in a holding tank and uses chemicals to minimize the odors. Chemical toilets include those on plane and trains (although many of these are now vacuum toilets), as well as much simpler ones.