The People's Square station toilets suck... and that's a good thing!

In just a few days, the People's Square rail station will be getting a new hoity toity fancy schmancy human waste disposal invention - vacuum toilets!

Vacuum toilets (which you've no doubt seen if you ever flown on an airplane) use vacuum instead of just gravity for flushing. Because the vacuum involved is usually pretty powerful, these types of water closets actually use a minimum amount of water.

That, and their propensity to be much less smelly thanks to vacuum sealing, were why the Shanghai transportation bureaus decided on going for vacuum toilets in the first place.

Last year, it had tried to install a type of eco-toilets that use bacteria to degrade pollutants in the subway stations. But the eco-toilet design could only serve about 200 people a day before it became overwhelmed and began to smell terrible. Bacterial decomposition, after all, takes time. The new vacuum toilets suck the matter straight into the municipal sewer system and are therefore just as functional as regular ones.

If the project works as well as everyone hopes it will, you'll soon see vacuum toilet systems in the rest of the subway system.

Source: Youth Daily on Netease