Raising a stink
Bad odours aren’t just a nuisance, they can cause illness-inducing stress, says Metro Vancouver’s head smell buster as calls to air quality complaint line rise
East Vancouver resident Blair Redlin and his neighbours are wary of inviting friends for a barbecue on a hot summer day. Those may be the days when West Coast Reduction, a nearby rendering plant, bathes their Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood in a smell so foul that eating from an outdoor grill is unthinkable.
Redlin, who has lived in his East Georgia Street house since 1991, says bad smells remain an ongoing, intermittent presence despite the company’s insistence that it’s getting better at controlling them.
“On the nicest days of the year, many people who live in this neighbourhood are forced to retreat into their homes and close the windows,” Redlin says.
“We don’t feel it’s acceptable that citizens should be asked to put up with this. We’re as entitled to a reasonable quality of life as anyone else in the Lower Mainland.”
People across Metro Vancouver are increasingly raising a stink when they get a snoot full of bad smells, regional officials say. Ray Robb, Metro’s head smell-buster, says people’s demands for clean-smelling air are rising — and their tolerance for stink is shrinking.
“From our perspective, people have higher expectations for air quality in general and odour in particular,” says Robb, Metro’s environmental regulation and enforcement division manager. “People get more upset about odour than anything else.”
Robb suggests a heightened fussiness about odours results when people are initially exposed to a bad smell in their neighbourhood. When they get a whiff of it again they are primed to get upset and call Metro’s air-quality line to lodge a complaint, he says.
But experts point to a fundamental shakeup in urban dwellers’ relationship with odours to explain our growing annoyance with bad smells. Cities used to be defined by the smells of animals wandering the streets.
They lacked sanitary sewers and emission controls on the pollutants spewed by factories, says Pamela Dalton, an olfactory researcher with Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization that studies smell and taste. With so many ever-present odours, people didn’t pay attention to them, she says.
As modern cities succeed in cutting odour pollution, people become more sensitized to bad smells, Dalton says.
“We’ve cleaned up our air both indoor and outdoor and now things we’ve never noticed before are becoming more noticeable,” says Dalton, giving the example of cigarette smoke in areas where smoking is restricted. “We have an increased level of awareness of smells.”
Bad smells become even more offensive to people when they feel trapped by an odour, Dalton says. There’s no escape from stench.
“You can’t put earplugs in or look away. If you’re breathing, you’re smelling,” she says.
This feeling of entrapment may also extend to what are usually perceived as positive odours.
“People living next to an industrial bakery don’t want to smell chocolate or vanilla all day long,” she says. “It becomes cloying. It becomes an intrusion.”
Another factor in our sensitivity to odours is a persistent, mistaken sense that bad smells are themselves harmful, Dalton says. Until the germ theory of disease gained widespread acceptance in the 1800s, people believed disease was transmitted through smell or bad air.
“There is still an almost primitive, naive belief that when we smell something we’re being exposed to something bad in the environment,” she says. “That becomes emotionally arousing.”
Dispelling smell pollution
University of B.C. professor Karen Bartlett says people’s alertness to bad smells in the urban environment may reflect other stresses in their personal and working lives — and become a stress itself.
“As our population gets more dense, we are becoming more stressed just because of our general environment,” says Bartlett, who teaches at UBC’s school of population and public health. “It can become a feedback mechanism in which, ‘I smell this smell, it’s bugging me, it must be related to something that’s harmful to me.’”
Dalton says people may over-react to low level chemical smells that can’t harm them. On the other hand, people often lose their awareness of noxious smells if they’re constantly surrounded by them, which is how workers in a chemical plant adapt to the odours of their workplace, Dalton says.
Metro Vancouver’s record on odours is a mixture of good and bad, Bartlett says.
“Vancouver is reducing the amount of air pollution in general and also in workplaces we’re doing a good job substituting things that have lower odour potential,” she says.
“On the other hand, we’re introducing chemicals into our environment everyday without any testing. We don’t know whether they’re hazardous or not.”
Robb agrees that Metro’s private sector has been making progress in controlling bad odours as smell-cleansing technology improves.
Government efforts to keep improving are also afoot. The region currently regulates the discharge of all air contaminants, including odiferous contaminants.
It’s now considering a new bylaw targeting organic odour sources.
“It is my understanding that the development of a bylaw to address odorous and other air contaminants from processing organic materials is planned for 2015,” Robb says.
Still, the region’s air quality complaints line is fielding a growing number of gripes.
emotional response
The number of odour complaints across Metro Vancouver has risen from 923 in 2010 to 1,022 last year. As of April 22 of this year, there were 393 complaints — and the region is just entering the warmer months when odours become more acute.
Robb says complaints have grown because there are more noses out there as the region’s population grows. And those noses are increasingly moving closer to industry, where they may be exposed to smells.
Between 2011 and 2012, smell complaints in Vancouver and Richmond soared as Harvest Power’s composting plant in Richmond failed to control smells from food scraps that began arriving there.
“Our staff could smell it in downtown Vancouver,” Robb says.
The facility scrambled to improve its odour management and complaints have since declined.
Weather is a key player in localized odours. Complaints increased from Walnut Grove in Langley last winter because a temperature inversion trapped smells there — even though there was no change in odour sources, Robb says.
Neighbourhoods that have come to identify the source of bad smells are vigilant if those smells return, he says. And research shows that smell has a hotline to the emotional centre of the brain.
“If there’s an odour that has an adverse impact on their livability and they can connect it with a source, every time they smell it they will get angrier and angrier,” he says.
That anger can lead people’s noses to mislead them. West Coast Reduction was blamed for some odours caused by Harvest Power a few years ago. And West Coast presidentCEO Barry Glotman says the animal byproducts recycler gets odour complaints on Sunday — a day when it doesn’t operate.
“We’re making continual improvements to limit impacts on people in the neighbourhood,” Glotman says. “The goal is to work toward zero odour. Things are substantially better than they were five years ago and 10 years ago and 15 years ago.”
Don Dickson takes no comfort from these assurances. After a decade living near West Coast Reduction, he and his wife had enough and moved out. The smell wasn’t the only factor that drove them to move four years ago “but it was a significant one.
“It was infuriating,” he says of the odour. “It’s a completely scandalous situation.”
Dickson says he has become so sensitized to the stench that when the wind blows from the rendering plant today, he can detect it from his False Creek condo.
Diesel emission — which Metro regulates through law — is the leading cause of cancer in the region from air contaminants, Robb says. Yet Metro gets far more complaints about bad smells than it does about more harmful emissions with less offensive odours, he says.
“You can walk through diesel smoke coming from an engine and it won’t bother you as much as having to go inside a latrine,” he says.
Robb respects people’s smell sensitivities because he understands that odours that are harmless in themselves can still damage human lives.
“Malodorous substances are primarily harmful due to the emotional response that they elicit — anger fear, humiliation, uncertainty of when they may occur next and inability to do anything about it — all of these responses are capable of leading to significant stress,” he says.
“Odours can cause stress and stress can cause illness.”