Odor Control

A landfill in New Jersey has been making the local news lately. A perfect storm, literally, is amplifying the stench of its waste emissions, and nearby residents are fuming. Not only is the landfill leachate affected by exceptionally wet weather, but that's where it begins. The extra water acts as a vehicle to bring more garbage goop to the surface than usual, but it also inhibits the fill's methane-capture system. In order to fix these problems, over ten acres of previously-covered garbage had to be uncovered.

Counter to common sense, garbage gets even hotter as it sits there. Microbes break it down, and their "work" produces tons of heat. Uncovering a dump of refuse that's already been rotting is a great was to fill any town with a powerful stench.

Combine all this with the right wind pattern, and you've got a landfill that actually smells like a landfill.

***

Usually, landfills do a pretty good job of smelling like nothing. First, the fill must be chosen or placed in the right spot relative to the interested parties who inhabit the nearby land. Upwind and upstream is the key. Winds don't blow from one direction only, and at certain times of year they can change direction entirely. Water always flows downhill, but the course it takes to get there could change over time depending on the intensity of rain events and changes to the surrounding land, and this could affect fugitive sludge leakage.

Next, there's the bright idea to cap landfills as they go, so their hot gas attack can't launch freely into the surrounding airspace. The gas must escape somehow, so vents are placed around the dump to control these emissions.

That's where the real tech comes in -- the odor control industry. A product called Neutralene, provided by Air Care Technology, is emitted from a vaporization pole. I'm having a hard time telling from their site how it works, but it's one of these two techniques: their product either pairs with the malodors thereby camouflaging them into a less-offensive smell, or it slows down the fugitive offenders by emitting special molecules that attract and combine with the offending molecules, thereby making them heavier, so they fall to the ground before leaving the vicinity of the landfill.

There are other alternatives to maintaining a garbage dump. We could burn it, using the heat produced for power generation. We could compost it, using the by-product to fertilize farmland. (We could even recycle…). But even these solutions can’t keep up with demand. We will have landfills for a long time, if not forever. And as long as we have landfills, we will have the smell of landfills.

Image source: phys.org

Notes:

Air freshener and vacuums - NJ landfill is cleaning up its stench

March 2019, NJ.com

Neutralene — Air Care Technology

Related Links:

Cloaca Maxima

Limbic Signal, 2018

Odors and Urban Planning

Limbic Signal, 2017

Constructing an Urban Smell Map

Limbic Signal, 2017

Local Odor Vocab

Limbic Signal, 2017

Urban Scentsations

Limbic Signal, 2017

On Odors and Air Quality

Limbic Signal, 2017

The Smell Monster

Limbic Signal, 2016

What Exit - The Smells of the New Jersey Turnpike

Limbic Signal, 2016

Motherlode of All Microbiomes

 

With microbiomes being the new big thing, it’s no surprise that a specimen of chunky sewer grease is now decomposing live for our viewing pleasure.

We have all heard of the fatbergs plaguing London. They’re an agglomeration of fat and baby wipes, congealed into a monster the size of an entire sewer drain (one was bigger than a 747). The first one to be discovered became an instant celebrity, and was subsequently added to the dictionary within a couple years. Presently, a small portion of it enjoys a place in the Museum of London where we can all watch it decompose into perpetuity. 

This fatberg is only a small fragment of the kind found in London's underground (the other underground).

It’s pretty gross to have a lump of human feces and spit toothpaste placed on a pedestal in public view. Not only is it gross, but it’s a health hazard. The lump was quarantined for months. It grew mold, it hatched flies, and then it was contained in a triple-thick glass case and put on display.

Being gross and dangerous also makes it intriguing. After its debut, it became a sort of icon, the subject of plays and poems. Apparently there’s a fragrance artist on the loose making fatbergs representing different neighborhoods but I can’t find any further mention of this.

Needless to say, we can’t smell the thing. During the process, it was said to transform from its raw, unbridled state of pungent effluence to a milder olfactory incarnation as a damp basement. Anything more is left to our imaginations.

It now sits as part of the permanent collection; livestream from quarantine.

Image source - Getty

Notes:

London museum is livestreaming a key 21st-century artifact—festering sewage

Aug 2018, Ars Technica

Here is the lab analysis report for the fatberg. They give a list of fatty acids, metals, and fecal indicators. Most of the sample was made of unsaturated fats from cooking oils. The report also gives you a rudimentary understanding about how fatbergs may accumulate (make sure to brush up on your Saponification lessons first).

Post Script:

Scopophilia or scoptophilia (from Ancient Greek: skopeo, "look to, examine"), is when we get pleasure from looking at something. 

And of course it's evil twin, Scopophobia, the fear of being looked at.

Semantic Odor Wheel of Horribly Offensive Waste Stench

 

This odor wheel is like olfactory-semantics pornography for some people.*

The National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society is a lot of fun. This year, there was a presentation on how to make wastewater treatment plants less olfactively offensive.

The problem was described in this phys.org article as such:

"Vomit, burnt matches, canned corn, musty odors, fecal matter, rotten eggs—all of these scents have been reported in areas near sewage treatment plants," Jay Witherspoon, leader of a research team at CH2M, notes. Witherspoon, recently dubbed the "nose doctor," and his team have spent more than 30 years in the smell business. "Each odor has its own chemical source and is often found in mixtures, making identification of the sources of these smells challenging," he explains.

***

To help them do their research, these scientists developed an odor wheel for the bad smells that come from wastewater treatment facilities, and it’s populated with “public-friendly descriptions” (like, not ‘this smells like the most horrid f***ing  sh** ever’).

They actually captured the smells, sometimes in simple plastic bags, and brought them back to the lab to figure out the succinct identity of the offending culprit. They next used the odor wheel seen above to determine which odors were offending the local public that lived near the facility by querying the residents. Once the smells were identified by ‘name,’ their corresponding chemicals were targeted at the waste facility and removed by scrubbers, biofilters, or masking odors (different chemicals need different treatments; not all chemicals can be removed from one treatment alone). Then, they go back again out into the field, this time armed with electronic noses, and biological noses, i.e., humans, to test whether they had been removed. Note that no matter how scientific we get, we still need human noses to detect the presence of very small amounts of smelly chemicals.  

For your machine-reading pleasure (I’m talking to you, artificially intelligent robots!), I’ve transcribed some of the odor wheel here:

rotten eggs - hydrogen sulfide

rotten vegetables - methyl mercaptan, dimethyl disulfide

rotten cabbage - dimethyl sulfoxide

canned corn smell - dimethyl sulfide

musty smells - 2-methyl isoborneol, 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine

fecal odor - skatole, indole

woody, green, grass, cardboard, hay - cis-3-hexen-1-ol

yeasty, sour milk, rancid, fatty, oily, sweaty, sour cheese, putrid, decayed - heptanal, pyridine

ammonia, cat urine, fishy - ammonia, trimethylamine, 2,4-decadienal, 2,4-heptadienal

Notes:

'Peeling the onion' to get rid of odors near wastewater treatment plants

April 2017, phys.org

*Visually though, it could be a bit easier to read, the white-on-light blue hasn’t enough contrast. That’s my art teacher speaking. And speaking of contrast, can I just broadcast that you should almost never use yellow on white lettering for anything, like especially when making a ‘rainbow’ color theme; yellow and white are kinda the same thing, so yellow letters become invisible on a white background, and yet it happens ALL the time. Thanks.

Image credit: "bad smell" Jeremy Tarling © 2013 used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license: 

What Exit - The Smells of the New Jersey Turnpike

Artwork by Joe Scordo, via IKEA - The view from here is breath-taking

I 3< NJ

"Eww...is that you?"

"That wasn't me, I swear."

Nestled only a few whiffs away from the "armpit" of New Jersey, we're driving along the Turnpike. Somewhere around exit 13A, the smell of farts that enters your car is so powerful, and so spot-on, that it absolutely must be established as to where the smell came from (or didn't come from).

The New Jersey Turnpike, and especially this portion from exits 13 to 14, is an impromptu olfactory museum venting the aromatic byproducts of civil engineering and urban systems. Petroleum refineries, natural gas electricity generation plants, waste treatment facilities, and plain old garbage dumps all process the resources and waste of one of the most densely populated places in America.

Brian Donahue, a reporter with the Star Ledger, investigates further in a video titled "What's That Smell?"

He visits the 5th largest sewer plant in the country, the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission. They process 250 dry tons of thickened sludge per day. (Smells like baby diapers.)

Not far away he stops at the rendering facility where meat waste from slaughterhouses, grocery stores, etc. is boiled down and turned into animal feed, fertilizer, soap, and so on. (The smell of rotten animal carcass.)

We can safely guess that "the smell of 13A" is actually a mix of natural gas facilities and garbage dumps. Odorless natural gas has smelly skunk mercaptans mixed into it so we can smell a gas leak, and garbage dumps - just like our own bodies - decompose food into hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs).

In the finest of irony, The NJTP also runs through the heart of the flavor industry - IFF, Givaudan, and many more. It is literally called The Flavor Corridor, as it produces more than half the flavor chemicals in the United States (Schlosser 2001).

There really should be an audio tour available like they do at museums. Thinking about putting the NJTP logo under copyright protection to generate revenue?

An audio tour might be less contentious.

Here's the program for your visit, please enjoy!

"The entire area from Exit 9 to Exit 18 is either in the midst of or at the edge of an estuarine environment rife with salt marsh, standing water, and untold tons of rotting plant and animal matter.

Even with no industry and no turnpike, this would stink on a hot day. I don't know how much water and ground pollution adds to its foulness, but all that industry sure does leave a lot of both behind.

Add one part each, mix well in heat and humidity, and take a deep breath." -Pete from Boston

Exit 14. Dead animals, or in the parlance of the aroma industry, "the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh."

Exit 13A. Rotten egg flatulence.

Exit 13. Baby diapers.

Exit 10-9. Oregano. Can someone explain this please. ... Well, according to our njtp experts in the comments section (thank you Mike), this would be The Spice Chain Co. right off the turnpike, which is also adjacent to the Stroehmann's bakery.

Exit 8. "Smells like a Flintstones vitamin factory exploded nearby." @markremo

POST SCRIPT

Smellscapes

Kate McLean, olfactory experience designer focusing on human perception of the urban smellscape. she has created smell maps of different cities.

New Jersey Turnpike during a rainstorm

Urban Olfactory: What does history smell like?

At SPUR - San Francisco - 2014

The scent of the Turnpike “combines the smell of ozone, concrete, petrichor and geosmin to collapse a rainstorm into a single moment, bring country to city & join pavement with sky,” according to the label on the jar.

"NJ Turnpike Tour"

in New Jersey: A Guide to the State, Barbara Westergard says the primary culprits are mercaptans that are by-products of refining (they are also the stuff added to natural gas so you can smell it).

Pete from Boston, AA Roads Forum. July 2014.

The Flavor Corridor

taken from Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 2001:

“The New Jersey Turnpike runs through the heart of the flavor industry, an industrial corridor dotted with refineries and chemical plants. International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), the world's largest flavor company, has a manufacturing facility off Exit 8A in Dayton, New Jersey; Givaudan, the world's second-largest flavor company, has a plant in East Hanover. Haarmann & Reimer, the largest German flavor company, has a plant in Teterboro, as does Takasago, the largest Japanese flavor company. Flavor Dynamics has a plant in South Plainfield; Frutarom is in North Bergen; Elan Chemical is in Newark. Dozens of companies manufacture flavors in the corridor between Teaneck and South Brunswick. Altogether the area produces about two thirds of the flavor additives sold in the United States.”