The team of Olores.org would like to wish all its readers a Happy New Year. Again Olores.org has grown beyond our wildest expectations. In terms of readership, this year we got about 63,088 page views, with over 45,895 unique visitors, 38,666 first time visitors and over 7,229 returning visitors. This has been made possible thanks to your dedication to reading and supporting us, so thank you.
We also would like to thank to our sponsors and advertisers. The support of these frequent advertisers allows us to provide Olores.org as a FREE community resources. This year the company TSG Environmental and the project DNOSES have supported this website. Thank you guys! Many other things have happened along this 2020 in the odour management world. Do you want to know more? Read on!
It is obvious that SARS-CoV-2 got all the attention this very strange year in which we learned new things, many of them positive, so we will stick to that. We hope you are safe, luckily we have not heard about any colleague getting affected by this disease, so those are wonderful news for our community.
It is a bit difficult to make a summary of over 100 posts we made this year. Maybe one of the most important news of this year was the cancellation of several important conferences related to the odour management due to the pandemia situation. The first one was the WEF Conference and after that it was followed by the NOSE conference cancellation. Luckily, these two important conferences will happen again next year in April within one and a half weeks.
This year, we finished publishing all the articles and editing all the videos of the conferences we organized at the end of 2019 in Chile. It takes us quite a bit to edit the papers to fit html standards, to cut the videos and edit them, to upload them all to our youtube channel and to upload presentations too. Usually we are doing this process for many months so for us, a conference is not finished until we publish the list of papers presented.
Papers of the Atmosphere Special Issue "Environmental Odour: Emission, Dispersion, and the Assessment of Annoyance" were published this year, as you know we support any initiative based on both open content and high quality research. If you miss the opportunity of presenting your work here, do not worry, cause the scientific Open Access journal Applied Sciences is currently running a Special Issue entitled “New Frontiers in the Assessment, Monitoring and Control of Environmental Odors". Last but not least, do not miss the chance to read the work of 18 international experts in a summary of odour regulations around the world.
About standardization, we cannot say much this year. The ISO 11136: 2020-11 dealing with hedonic testing was published last month. Also, at an international level, the 27th of August 2020 took place the kickoff meeting of the group dealing with the development of the first international guideline on the assessment of odour exposure by using dispersion modelling
In Europe, we were hoping for the publication of the revised EN 13725 after a year of very intensive working group meetings, but it is not finally made. Also, there were many meetings of the Working Group 41 dealing with Instrumental Odour Monitoring Systems. There is a need for a larger data set of IOMS/olfactometry measurement to validate the statistical approach to deal with QAL1, that is why members of the Task Group are asking for more data.
On the national side, a draft of the Dutch standard NTA 9065 on Odour Measurement and Calculation was finally released. The text provides requirements and instructions for the standard procedure for conducting odour testing in the Netherlands, and it has been divided in 2 parts: NTA 9065 Part 1 dealing with planning, execution and reporting of odour investigations and NTA 9065 Part 2 dealing with sampling and analysis. We just learnt this week that this draft has been finally approved although the final text is not published at this stage.
In Spain, the group that is working on a new Spanish Standard on odour mapping using odour observations with citizen science is having regular meetings at a steady pace. By next year the first working draft will probably be published under the umbrella of the Spanish standardization agency. This new tool that finally links odour annoyance with odour impact is being used in many other parts of the world. Also in Spain the UNE-CEN/TR 17511 related to odour of end-of-life tyres granulates was published. This standard deals with the origin and remediation possibilities for this by-product.
In the USA, many ASTM standards have got some minor revisions this year such as the ASTM E3093 or the ASTM E1958 to put some examples.
In Germany as usual a good deal of news related to odour management. As a ping:
- A draft of the VDI 3475 sheet 7 was published in February dealing with odour emission factors for biological waste treatment.
- The draft of the VDI 2283 that is dealing asphalt mixing plants provides information on the potential to reduce odours for these plants.
- The VDI 2596 dealing among other things with the reduction of odours from slaughterhouses was published in July.
- An interesting VDI 4221 Part 4 dealing with the requirements for proficiency testing in the field of olfactometry under laboratory conditions was published in August. Interestingly, this happened after learning this year about another initiative in Italy related to proficiency testing.
- The DIN 10950 dealing with general principles of sensoring testing was published in September
- And many standards with "odours" in them such as: products for treatment of water for human consumption, or for the treatment of swimming and bathing pool water, plastics, semen analysis, determination of the composition of waste paper, wheelchairs, scooters, natural gas vehicles, indoor air of road vehicles, person-centered care, packaging materials when composted, chemical disinfectants and antiseptics, identification of oil spills, refrigeration systems and heat pumps, cosmetic products, plastic piping systems for sewers, hospital cleaning, urinals, textiles, ice creams, funeral services, etc. Check this website for more.
As for regulations, the European IPPC Bureau published 2 new Best Reference Guidelines (BREFs) for: Food, Drink and Milk Industries and Waste Incineration. These two particular BREFs have something in common, they both include the Odour Management Plan (OMP) as one of the Best Available Techniques (BAT) for odour control and/or monitoring.
This year was also the year of the "online webinars". Just related to odour management there has been almost a few tens of webinars to the point that we had to it was hard to follow them all. They have been all publicized in this website. Just selecting one is very difficult, but as we would like to make your life easier we would recommend you this one that is actually recorded and free.
This is our summary of the year, but if we missed something let us know in the comment section. Our purpose for the next year is to further enhance our activities, to inform you about any event related with odour management in the world and of course to organize the 9th International IWA Odour and VOC/Air Emissions Conference. We hope to meet you there!!
