Advertising feature
Sewage can be a smelly business, when household and trade waste are combined in the sewage treatment plant volatile compounds that cause smell can become airborne and affect the noses of residents.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Dealing with nuisance smells is a top priority for TasWater and for acting leader of sewage system performance, Kate Westgate.
“When treatment plants were first built, odour wasn’t at the forefront of people’s concerns, and it has only been in recent years that odour has become an issue as developments close to these sites has meant that there are now residents close by,” Kate said.
“TasWater has a duty of care to ensure that our industry isn’t impacting on other people.
“In our Environmental Licences agreement we must manage our odour so it doesn’t cause environmental nuisance past our boundary.”
An ‘Intelligent Personal Olfactometer’ or ‘sniffer’ is a new piece of technology that is helping TasWater measure problem odours.
This handy piece of tech, fits into a backpack and draws in a sample of ambient air and mixes it with a sample of odourless air, the operator wears a face mask in which they can smell both samples and with the use of a tablet they can select different dilutions and find out an odour value.
This advertising feature is sponsored by the following business. Click the link to learn more.
“This piece of equipment allows us to visit sites and conduct focused investigations where before we have never been able to quantify what the odour is,” Kate said.
“We take odour seriously, and we are trying to manage our odour footprints and reduce the environmental nuisance.
“We are doing a lot of work behind the scenes in the odour field, and the sniffer is now something that we can use to react to complaints and improve the situation.”
Dealing with odour however can be tricky, not everyone smells at the same level, while some can smell minute concentrations of one smell, someone else might not smell anything.
“If we have an odour complaint from a customer we can even get them to use the sniffer to verify at what level they can smell the odour,” Kate said.
“This allows us to be proactive when it comes to containing any smells from our sewage treatment plants.
“Part of our infrastructure upgrades was to cover parts of the plant we knew produced odour and install odour extractors.
“If there is no way of fixing the odour we have ways of containing or treating them with chemicals to help reduce odours as sewage comes through the network to the treatment plants.”