Deal with Swamp Thing instead of hiding the smell
I am troubled by these aerosol sprays that claim to eliminate household odours.
You probably have seen the ads on TV. People are blindfolded and then duped into various malodorous environments — an ill-ventilated locker-room, a hot car filled with mouldering food garbage, a party house the morning after — that have been treated with a few spritzes of the deodorizing spray.
Asked to describe what they smell, the blindfolded subjects say it’s a garden in springtime or fresh laundry just off the line, or some such. Then they are sure amazed when the blindfolds are removed and they behold their stinky surroundings, but without the attendant stink.
Fine. I will concede that the stuff works as advertised. That’s what’s troubling. Instead of cleaning up whatever is causing the bad smell, we are invited by these ads to just deal with the odour. Spritz, spritz and the eye-watering stench is magically removed, but the putrid source remains and continues to putrefy.
That’s the problem. Bad smells are a warning, except to vermin, which rally to bad smells. To the rest of us, a bad smell is saying, “This environment is unhealthy. Clean it up before you catch one of the many diseases associated with rats, insect infestations and bacteria cultures.”
Simply spritzing away the bad smell will not get it done. That’s like turning off the blaring smoke alarm and ignoring the curtains on fire.
Deodorizer sprays do nothing to attack the source of the smell. They work by chemically enveloping the smelly molecules floating around in the air that otherwise, when inhaled, make you wrinkle your nose and look around for a decaying corpse.
Of course, it’s easier to spritz the basement with a deodorizer than it is to drag a corpse up the stairs and out the back door. That’s the big appeal of these sprays, and the danger. Don’t bother dealing with the squalor, they are saying. Just toss those chicken bones over your shoulder and spray away the ensuing smell.
At least there is no proposal yet to use chemical deodorizers on a municipal scale. Consider, for instance, the smell from the sewage treatment plant in the city’s north end. In the midst of capital improvements costing about $30 million, the plant will not be as smelly in the future, we are told.
It might cost a fraction as much to install giant squirt bottles of Febreze around the plant to spritz away the stench, but you would have to wonder, then, if city hall really was serious about sewage treatment. Substandard plumbing on any scale cannot be fixed with a deodorizer.
Consider the smaller environment inside your fridge. We all have opened the fridge and been confronted by the horrible smell of something gone bad. Usually it’s the broccoli, lurking for weeks behind the onions and the lettuce in the dark recesses in the back of the vegetable crisper, and now turned into the Swamp Thing, terror of the kitchen. The traditional procedure is to find the fetid Swamp Thing, throw it away and scrub out the crisper. Thus is the family’s primary fresh food storage unit returned to a sanitary state.
Is that better or is it not better, than just spritzing the inside of the fridge with deodorizer to deal with the distinctive aroma of decomposition and leaving the septic Swamp Thing within to grow and multiply?
Hardly any different is using the stuff to eliminate household odours. The chemically treated air within might convey the delicate bouquet of a mountain meadow in spring, but that doesn’t get the dead mouse out from behind the stove. I just hate to think of being tricked into not smelling something rotten.