About 300 residents in an Chinese city have become volunteer “sniffers” to detect factories producing foul smells outside normal working hours.
The sniffers have been hired by the local authorities to try and calm concerns about odours eminating from an industrial park in the eastern city of Jiaxing.
While an air-sampling machine can read pollution levels, the authorities say it is better to rely on human noses to gauge the impact of factory emissions on daily life and to trace the source of pollutants.
At a petro-chemical factory that uses acetic acid, the volunteers sniff for any whiff of sourness. At a fuel manufacturer, they try to discern any hint of natural gas, and near a silicon company, they are on alert for fishy smells, a telltale sign of the presence of trimethylamine.
Faced with rising demands and health concerns from the country’s middle class, China has vowed to address environmental woes, and the local authorities are recruiting concerned residents to play the watchdog role.
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“We would like to enlist the public in rule enforcement, and we will go wherever there’s a foul smell,” an unnamed environmental protection official told the government-run China Forum of Environmental Journalists about the plan to recruits the odour detectives.
“On the day we announced the plans to recruit public volunteers, the phone was ringing non-stop from people asking how they could become sniffers.”
The sniffers must abstain from smoking and drinking before their assignments and not have a cold when they are working.
The volunteers convene at 8pm, and put on safety vests before patrolling the industrial park. When any unusual smell is detected, the volunteers will try to trace the source of the odour or a leak. The work can go on late into the night.
Volunteers report that the pungent smells that once plagued the neighbourhood have been noticeably reduced, and the authorities say they have received fewer complaints.
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The factories under scrutiny say they have invested heavily in building systems to collect and treat emissions and wastewater. Some have installed public screens to display real-time data on emissions.