"The most accessible and sophisticated environmental monitoring equipment is made available to most humans in the forms of noses, eyes, tongues, ears and skin". Sara Sage.

This page collects resources to keep track of bad odor events for further investigating their origin and their potential effects on people. The presence of bad odor events usually means the presence of hydrogen, methane and other dangerous gases. Keeping track of them and investigating their origin is a matter of health.

Odor Log 1.0

You can use the Odor Log 1.0 to keep track of the events just using paper, pen and your nose. Use this steps as guidance:

• Download a printable log
• Coordinate with some neighbours for simultaneously track the bad odor events in different points of your neighbourhood/town.
• Decide the length of the monitoring. Take at least a 2 week long record if the events are on a daily basis. If events are for example, once a week, consider taking a longer log.
• Note on the log every day even if there's no bad odor event.
• Take a picture of every page of your log pages or scan them.
• You can then send the files with the results to your local authorities carbon copied to some newspapers and the EPA or the environmental authority in your country. Doing this, a track of your public complaint will be kept in several entities and mail servers.

Using the Odor Log 1.0 you can go from an undefined "there are lots of bad odor events in my area" to a documented "we've counted xxxx number of bad odor events located in A, B, C, and D places"...

Documents

Documents and manuals about odor detection, identification and monitoring that are spread on the web. Please feel free to add your findings.

• Community assesment of environmental odors, by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
• Standardized odor measurement practices for air quality testing, by Charles M. McGinley.
• The smell report, an overview of facts and findings, by Kate Fox, Director of the Social Issues Research Centre.
• Odor pollution in the environment and the detection instrumentation, by Arief Sabdo Yuwono.
• Odor thresholds for hazardous air pollutants, by the Environmental Protection Agency

Questions

Activities

Research notes