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

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.