Relation Between Odour Concentration and Chemical Composition of Biofilter Effluents at Aerobic Composting and Rendering Plants

Goal and Scope. Odour pollution is of growing concern in industrial and agricultural areas. Minimising odour nuisance can be achieved through converting plants to a closed design, by changing process parameters and by applying endof-pipe techniques like biofiltration. The efficiency of these odour reduction measures can be evaluated by odour measuring techniques based on either chemical analysis or on sensory analysis using the human nose as a detector. Gas chromatography (GC) in combination with mass spectrometry (MS) has been used by several researchers to identify the chemical composition of odorous samples. For sensory analysis, olfactometry provides the best method currently available for odour concentration measurements. The method is however time consuming, labour intensive, expensive and subjected to error. A solution to these problems is the correlation of the concentration of volatile compounds with odour concentration so that the odour concentration can be estimated from the GC-MS analysis.