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Odours have the potential to cause significant impacts on people's lives and adversely affect their amenity. Odour is one of the main causes of complaints to the EPA. The impacts from odours can vary from being just detectable to levels which can cause nuisance and become objectionable and offensive.
Under the Environment Protection Act 1993, odour is a pollutant. The 'general environmental duty' states that one must not undertake an activity that pollutes or might pollute the environment.
Impacts of odour
The main effect of environmental odour is nuisance, but stronger or persistent odours can lead to feelings of nausea, headache, loss of sleep and other symptoms of stress.
Repeated exposure to nuisance levels of odour can lead to a high level of annoyance. While some people may become acclimatised to odours, others may become sensitised to them.
Responses of the individual to odours may be influenced by a variety of factors including:
- state of health
- previous experience with the odour
- relationship to the enterprise generating the odour (if a person’s livelihood is dependent, directly or indirectly, on the operation, the perception of the odours may not be as severe if the person has had negative experiences with the operation).
There are several factors, which can determine the potential for nuisance, annoyance and complaint. These are often referred to the FIDOL factors:
- frequency
- intensity
- duration
- offensiveness
- location.
Generally the greater the frequency, intensity, duration, offensiveness of an odour, the more likely it is likely to cause annoyance and complaint.
Industry and odour management
To assist companies to assess the potential impacts of their developments, the EPA has published a guideline Odour assessment using odour source modelling to provide advice and criteria for the management of odour emissions.
Odours can be reduced by good design and good management. The EPA has developed Guidelines for separation distances to provide a recommended separation distance for a range of new or expanding industries to ensure that environmental nuisance is minimised at neighbouring sensitive receptors.
Last modified: 08/05/2012 02:24 pm
