Integration of Automatic Remote Systems for Olfactory Annoyance Detection and Evaluation in the City of Taranto

Abstract

Odour annoyance represents one of the most emerging aspects related to odour emissions, produced by industrial plants. The possibility of making objective this type of annoyance constitutes a complex issue to face, due to the subjective features of the olfactory perception and to the difficulty to identify with certainty the source of emissions. To the purpose, some international guidelines consider the employment of human assessors as a valuable method for the impact evaluation of an industrial plant on the territory (by means of administration of questionnaires addressed to the residents or field inspections, properly planned). These approaches provide only qualitative and quantitative indexes of annoyance and require some months of investigation before obtaining results. This paper focuses on the development of a methodology for the detection and evaluation of olfactory annoyance, integrating automatic remote systems able to record the olfactory perception of human receptors and to collect odour samples in real time. The experimental study has been applied in the city of Taranto, in the South of Italy, where the residents have been reporting so much discomfort for odour emissions, produced by plants located in the industrial area. The integrated system requires the direct involvement of population; by means of a phone switchboard, the residents communicate in real time the perception of odour events and their intensity (according to an intensity scale of three levels). The different warnings are displayed on a map together with the meteorological data in order to associate the emissions to the sources on the territory. According to a chosen routine (number of warning for index of intensity recorded in a defined time range), remote automatic sampling systems, located in particular sites on the territory, are activated in order to collect a representative sample, that could be analyzed through dynamic olfactometry. In this paper, the preliminary results obtained during the experimental campaign will be presented, underlining the advantages connected with a remote sampling.