Authorised environmental officers in Australia needed to streamline the process of identifying and resolving community odour complaints.

The taskforce faced challenges in terms of monitoring odour concentration in the industrial area as it consisted of multiple landfills and composting operations. While odour nuisance complaints only provide a snapshot in time of an issue, there’s fragmented data from multiple monitor locations across the area. It was difficult for the authorised officers to tell what caused exceedances as it could be from a range of different activities. 

In addition, the authorised officers needed to be armed with hard evidence of air quality impact to engage with operators in the industrial area. Manually collecting this information from multiple locations proved to be time consuming and only provided information on past events.

In 2020, the regulatory body contracted Envirosuite to understand odour nuisance caused by landfill operations in the industrial area. The designated team worked with Envirosuite to install 6 eNose monitors across the area and implemented a comprehensive Environmental Intelligence platform, EVS Omnis. 

The environmental management software provided the taskforce with visualisation of continuous monitoring of odour concentration in the area and real-time alerts for threshold exceedances. It also enabled officers to track reported odour sources and the affected pathway using the platform’s reverse trajectory modelling feature. 

Reverse trajectory air quality modelling in the EVS Omnis platform 

Reverse trajectories are unique to Envirosuite and can be integrated with a ticketing system for odour management. These can be configured to generate automatically in the platform if a complaint is submitted by community members. 

Since the implementation of EVS Omnis, the designated team has rapidly analysed thousands of air quality complaints. The taskforce now uses EVS Omnis reverse trajectories to identify the pathway that the air has travelled, leading up to a reported event. 

Odour reports in the platform enable designated officers to correlate trends in odour emissions movement, weather conditions, and the potential sources of complaints. This can be instantly linked back to specific industry activities and behaviours that cause nuisance odour. 

An example of real-time odour monitoring in the EVS Omnis platform 

The team also makes calculated decisions based on forward trajectories to prevent unfolding odour nuisance complaints. Prior to EVS Omnis, the odour event would continue until reported by someone in the community.

The taskforce now uses Envirosuite’s platform to conduct proactive odour survey operations, resulting in enforcement action taken against businesses causing odour emissions in the community.

Find out more in detail about how the local environmental regulatory body used environmental intelligence to:  

• Identify odour sources in the locality 

• Resolve community odour complaints quickly 

• Allocate resources for incident response team 

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