In October 2016 we organized the first Odour Talks. The idea was to select key experts in several fields of odour management and to let them present a work of interest on the subject. To make this experience available to the rest of the world, we did a webcast online of the Talks. Some people subscribed to the webcast sessions and they could do online questions to the speakers. A few months after this experience, we have decided to make the videos available to everyone, so here you have the first Odour Talk by Mr. Hugo van Belois.

  Mr van Belois is an environmental engineer that studied in the Wageningen university and who has worked in the field of odour /odour nuisance in the Netherlands for over 25 years. He has worked both in the consultancy and with the government. The last five years he has worked as an independent consultant on the field of Air quality and a healthy living environment.

   Spatial planning is the best way to prevent odour nuisance, keeping apart the sources and the neighbourhoods. The Netherlands have a long tradition about spatial Zoning. In 1990, this country set an objective for odour annoyance: By 2010 Dutch people should be no longer subject to serious odour annoyance from the industry the agriculture and the road traffic. Was this goal achieved?

   In his very interesting Odour Talk, Mr van Belois presents the approaches taken by the Dutch Government on spatial planning with odours. There is a National Guide on Environmental Zoning with setback distances for different activities that has to be used with caution.

   The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency is developing a database with odour setback distances for the 40.000 odour-relevant sources of this country.

  Mr van Belois presented an example of calculation of impact distances in the Rotterdam Rijnmond area and how this approach could calculate the number of dwellings affected by the odour impact of these sources.

   This approach was of great use in Rotterdam because it showed that some of the future houses already planned were expected to have a high odour impact. This way the city could have more tools for planning and the Environmental Agency could set odour limits according to the number of people that could have an odour impact.

   Do you want to know more? Enjoy this video here:

   Download the program of the Odour Talks here. 

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• The European Environment Agency believes that the odours do not affect the air quality in Europe