A lot of companies can coast for years on the idea that their business is too basic to fail. People will always need clean, functional restrooms at construction sites, stadiums, festivals, and disaster response zones. The demand feels permanent.
But permanence does not protect you from leverage. When a company carries billions in debt, the real product is not portable toilets. The real product is cash flow that arrives on time, every time, no matter what fuel costs do, no matter what labor does, no matter what the housing market does.
That is the quiet tension inside a private equity playbook. A service can be essential, even boring, and still be financially fragile if the capital stack is built for perfect conditions.
On December 29, 2025, United Site Services, better known as USS, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New Jersey with a plan to eliminate $2.4 billion of debt and turn the company over to its lenders.
The filing is designed as a reorganization, not a shutdown. USS is telling customers and vendors to expect business as usual while the balance sheet is rebuilt in court, and it is seeking the usual first-day approvals to keep paying employees and to keep critical vendors whole.
For the people who own the equity today, it is a different story. Platinum Equity Partners, the private equity firm that has controlled USS since buying it in 2017, is positioned to be wiped out under the restructuring. In bankruptcy terms, that means the existing shares are cancelled, and the companyโs lenders become the new owners through a debt-for-equity swap.
What Chapter 11 Means
This is the cleanest way to understand why Chapter 11 can look calm on the surface. The trucks keep rolling, the toilets still get delivered, the call centers still answer. The violence happens on paper, ownership and claims get reordered, and someoneโs stake becomes worth zero.
USS claims to be the largest portable sanitation provider in the U.S., with approximately 350,000 portable restrooms, around 3,000 employees, and more than 70,000 customers. Its client list spans big events and public sector work, including the Super Bowl and FEMA, alongside the day-to-day bread and butter of construction and residential building projects.
What broke the model, according to the companyโs court filings and public statements, was the combination that has punished leveraged businesses across the economy. Inflation pushed up operating costs, interest costs stayed high, and a downturn in residential construction reduced demand from a customer base that is unusually sensitive to the housing cycle.
Portable sanitation looks like a steady utility until you map the inputs. Fuel is not optional. Labor is not optional. Fleet maintenance is not optional. When those costs rise quickly, there is only so much pricing power you can exercise before customers push back, especially in competitive local markets.
A Restructuring Plan
The restructuring plan has broad support among creditors, but it is not unanimous. USS has warned that one large holdout creditor opposes the plan and could try to slow the process through litigation. In a fast, prepackaged Chapter 11, that kind of resistance matters because the whole point is speed.
To fund the case, USS has lined up $120 million in new debtor-in-possession financing from existing lenders. For the exit, the company has described a package that includes up to $480 million in equity financing through a rights offering and $300 million in exit financing, with a goal of completing the restructuring by February 2026.
Those numbers also explain why the equity gets erased. If the debt is too large relative to what the business can reliably earn, the company is not worth enough to pay everyone.
Bankruptcy law is built around a priority ladder. That means senior lenders get paid first, then junior lenders, and only then does value flow to equity. When the value stops at the lender level, the equity is done.
Outside the courtroom, the story is already being used as a proxy fight over private equity itself. Critics see a familiar arc, borrow heavily to buy a company, load the operating business with the cost of that debt, then scramble when the economy turns. Defenders counter that leverage is a tool, not a sin, and that creditors are sophisticated parties who price risk for a living.
Both can be true. Leverage is sometimes treated as a free lunch, but it eventually demands payment. A business can be operationally sound and still be financially unsound if the financing assumes the world stays smooth.
For customers like us, the practical takeaway is simple. A Chapter 11 like this is built to preserve service. The company needs to keep collecting revenue to prove it can survive, and the lenders who are about to own it have every incentive to keep operations stable. Well-defined strategies, often tracked with project management spreadsheets or apps, can help keep businesses on track for improvement.
The toilets won’t disappear tomorrow. The risk is that the service gets squeezed over time if the company cuts too deeply to hit near term targets.
If you want the underlying details straight from the primary reporting and the companyโs own language, here are two source documents worth reading. Reutersโ report summarizes the filing and financing terms, and USSโs press release lays out the restructuring support agreement and its โno disruptionโ message.
In the end, the bankruptcy is not a mystery, it is a rebalancing. The company still does a job the country needs. The question is whether it can do that job with a capital structure that matches reality, not optimism.
