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Kate Murphy reports at the NYT that although one person’s putrid is another person’s pleasant, local governments are beginning to regulate intrusive and unpleasant smells using high tech devices. If you time-travelled back 200 years or so, you’d likely scrunch up your nose. Our forebears threw sewage out their windows, and the primary mode of transport — horses — relieved themselves all over the street. These days 'we have so reduced the level of background odor pollution, we are becoming more sensitive to anything we smell,” says Pamela Dalton, an olfactory researcher at Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit group in Philadelphia that studies smell and taste. In the past offenders were typically livestock operations and wastewater treatment plants, but more recently odor inspectors are getting calls about smells emanating from ethnic restaurants, coffee roasters and candle and bath shops. In an effort to be objective, a growing number of locales have begun using a device called a Nasal Ranger, which looks like a megaphone for the nose and measures the intensity of smells according to a so-called dilution ratio (PDF). An odor is considered intrusive if the average person can smell it when it is diluted with seven parts clean air — a decades-old threshold of stinky.
New York City received more than 10,000 odor complaints last year, many from residents upset about cooking smells wafting into their apartments from restaurants and coffee houses — smells that might be pleasing when patronizing those same establishments. “A lot of it has to do with tolerance level in neighborhoods that are getting gentrified,” says Ben Siller. “People at lower socio-economic levels may tolerate something much better than someone who moves into the same area and buys a house, sinks a fortune into remodeling and then goes out in the backyard and smells a pot grower, charbroiler, pet food manufacturer or something stinky like that.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aclarke on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:51PM
This problem seems to be intensified when people move into a new area with existing industries and businesses, and then are unhappy with what they find when they get here. Around here, this leads to frustrated commuters annoyed that "their" road is being blocked by a tractor after moving into their dream country property, or being annoyed by the odour caused by farmers spreading manure. If you don't want to deal with pre-existing conditions, don't move into the area.
It's the opposite issue that could cause one to become reasonably annoyed by odour. I'd potentially be annoyed if a business with a smell I found objectionable moved in next door to my house. However, even that often seems like a proxy for "there are people with different customs and cultures living near me and I find that uncomfortable."
My olfactory issue is the beef farmer across the road who feeds his cattle watermelons. By the dump truck load. He gets paid to take them after they're too rotten to sell. But even that isn't a big deal as it's a good 500m away so I hardly ever smell it. Plus, he was here first. In other words, it's not a very big problem at all.