Gigglebit: It’s pee-back time in St Pauli … mind your shoes boys

6 Mar 2015

Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note – and today we have a doozy.

Residents in St Pauli, Hamburg, are fed up with nightclub-goers frequently urinating against their walls in the nightclub district.

They’re so fed up, it seems, that they’ve gotten all science on the perpetrators, enlisting the help of some pretty brilliant paint to bounce urine back off walls and onto the pee-ers.

Yep, this paint is not just water-resistant, it downright hates moisture. It hates it bad. So now, when someone unzips and lets loose, the ‘pee-back time’ ensues.

Perhaps the best thing to come of this, however, is the realisation that Germans call those who engage in such ghastly acts as Wildpinklers, which translates as wild urinaters. Wildpinklers could well be the greatest term ever.

Before, after

This still from the project’s YouTube video illustrates the technology fantastically – and colourfully

“This paint job sends a direct message back to perpetrators that their wild urinating on this wall is not welcome,” says Julia Staron, who organised the group. “On the streets here, it’s like being in a sewer.

“The paint protects the buildings and the residents and most importantly it sends a signal this behaviour is not on.”

The paint is as wondrous as it is expensive, with Reuters reporting that it costs about €500 per six-square metre. “If you compare the work involved for daily cleaning of the mess and the awful smell, as well as all the collateral damage involved, it has definitely been well worth it,” she says.

“Be careful,” she says at the end of this video, “it’s pee-back time.” Then she laughs, because pee.

No pee sign via Shutterstock

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com