The deployment and operation of rural waste transfer stations, which now cover towns and villages across all regions, have established a fully integrated collection and transportation system for rural household waste. This initiative not only addresses the shortcomings in rural environmental management but also represents a critical step forward in tackling the issue of “waste surrounding villages.” The transformation from haphazard dumping to centralized transportation, and from manual collection to mechanized compression, signifies a profound and dynamic shift in rural waste management.
In remote villages of northwestern and southwestern China, waste transfer stations are equipped with submerged structures and fully enclosed compression facilities, capable of processing several to twenty tons of waste per day. This ensures that rural household waste is collected and treated on the same day, reducing the retention time from three or four days to within 12 hours. Sanitation workers transport the collected waste to the transfer stations, where it is directly fed into the compression equipment through input ports. Utilizing hydraulic devices, the equipment compresses the waste efficiently, reducing its volume to one-third of the original. The compressed waste is then transported by specialized vehicles to landfills or waste-to-energy incineration plants. This process significantly cuts both transportation and labor costs.
During the compression of household waste at submerged transfer stations, the leachate extracted is channeled into nearby collection wells within the foundation pit. It is then regularly collected by suction trucks and delivered to wastewater treatment plants, mitigating water and soil pollution in rural areas. The transition from “letting sewage evaporate and waste scatter in the wind” to “having a systematic collection and transportation system and standardized treatment processes” highlights how rural waste transfer stations have connected the chain of urban and rural environmental governance.