The 17^th of August, the Decision of the European Commission establishing the best available techniques (BAT) conclusions for Waste Treatment (WT), have been published in the Official Journal of the European Union. This legislative text mentions fifty-three BATs for use in WT. Among those 53 BATs, the BAT number 34 includes 5 techniques: Adsorption, Biofiltration, fabric filter, thermal oxidation and wet scrubbing. This legislation sets a range of 200 to 1000 ou_E/m³ as the maximum allowed odour concentration for these BATs for biological treatment of waste.

   The last meeting of the Technical Working Group that discussed the renovation of the former BAT Reference (BREF) Document on Waste Treatment (WT) took place in march 2017. After a few drafts and plenty of discussion, the final draft was published in October 2017. This final draft marked a new milestone in the odour management for twenty-eight (28) countries of Europe, as it was the first BREF that included an odour emission limit. This month the final conclusions of this BREF have been published and this odour limit is now law.

   The Standard Test Method for Sensory Analysis—Triangle Test has been recently revised and published. This standard covers a procedure for determining whether a perceptible sensory difference exists between samples of two products.

   The ASTM Committee E18 on Sensory Evaluation of Materials and Products has recently published the revision of the ASTM E1885-18. This is a minor update that  involves the inclusion of conversion tables between proportion of discriminators and Thurstonian delta values. The rest of the text remains as is.