China’s high-speed trains are overwhelmed by poop, study says

Researchers find levels of human waste compounds are hundreds or even thousands of times higher at railway stations than rest of urban sewage system

As scientists race to develop new technology to prevent ‘system meltdown’, bacteria-based method might offer answers

Reading Time:4 minutes

Chinese researchers spent a year monitoring the waste water quality at a major high speed rail station in Beijing, and the results worried them. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 6:00am, 2 Jun 2023Updated: 9:20am, 2 Jun 2023

The explosive growth of high-speed rail in China has brought a boom in human waste on trains, threatening a meltdown for the railway network’s sewage treatment facilities, according to researchers commissioned by the government to solve the crisis.

“The processing capabilities of waste treatment facilities are declining, some of them already out of service,” said the team led by senior engineer Xin Siyuan with the China State Railway Group in a peer-reviewed paper published in journal Railway Standard Design on May 24.

Xin’s team said that after spending a year closely monitoring the waste water quality at a major high-speed rail station in Beijing, they were deeply worried about the results.

They found the levels of organic compounds indicative of human waste were hundreds or even thousands of times higher in the station than what was typically found elsewhere in the urban sewage system, especially during public holidays.

“The waste water from sealed toilets on trains has a higher content of suspended solids, organic matter (COD), nitrogen, and phosphorus than general domestic waste water,” Xin’s team wrote.

“With the increase of the amount of waste water from sealed toilets, the existing sewage treatment facilities can no longer meet the current urban network discharge standards, and it is urgent to establish more complete waste water treatment facilities,” they added.

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