SIMPLE ANOTEC ENVIRONMENTAL ODOUR CONTROL

With increasing Environment Protection Authority (EPA), WorkSafe and council requirements, dust and odours can no longer be managed with a simple garden hose.

In providing a solution, ANOTEC has leveraged its more than 20 years of experience across Australia and New Zealand to reduce business costs and help them find best practice equipment for the task. ANOTEC works with landfills and transfer station owners/operators to provide a custom solution to the challenges within the industry. What is it worth to a company to be issued an abatement notice over a site? That’s compared to paying a modest cost for an odour and dust management solution, allowing you to continue working uninterrupted. The technology utilises pumps to generate microscopic air droplets capable of weighing down and suppressing dust and odour.

The key to effective dust suppression is creating minute water droplets in the fine micron range that are a similar size to the dust particles the site manager is hoping to suppress. Splitting water up into micron-sized droplets increases the opportunity for dust suppression, including dust in the harmful particulate matter 10 size range. For odour control, water is the carrier of a low dose odour elimination product carried within the droplet itself. Eliminating odours by oxidation or encapsulation renders the molecule odourless, preventing neighbouring businesses being adversely affected by a business’ operations. Inferior products with low pressure units, or units without pressure pumps, create a much larger droplet that simply moves around the dust particle.

This fails to collide with the dust particle and weigh it down, leading to further operational problems such as excessive surface water and run off. He says this is great for wetting down dust already on the floor, but ineffective at hitting the airborne dust fractions or keeping people safe from breathing these particles in. Conversely, splitting a normal droplet several thousand times over creates a high surface area, low volume droplet – creating millions of opportunities to knock out dust. Many of the droplets evaporate, preventing unwanted runoff and welcomed cooling in the hot Australian climate. Finer droplets outside are susceptible to wind, while heavier droplets tend to be not so susceptible, so it is application-driven. Medium pressure units are good outdoors, addressing both airborne dust and potentially dampening down on the ground, or a stockpile you can’t reach with a water cart. You’re minimising the dust being put into the air while addressing airborne dust. Waste industry will have its own operational constraints and if we can save water usage, we’re going to be able to save on odour product usage and costs as well – adding value to our clients. Getting close to the source of the dust or odour and apply some fogging around that area, it is far better than doing it outside the building or on the periphery of your site. This is because you’ve got the same amount of odour spread out over a wider distance and its harder to control.

EPA stumped by fish odour problem

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) says there is nothing it can do to reduce the odour from dead and dying fish at Lake Boga, near Swan Hill in north-west Victoria.

The Swan Hill Rural City Council says it is waiting for advice from the EPA about managing the odour.

But the EPA's acting chairman Bruce Dawson says the only way to remove the odour is to remove the fish, but that is not possible because of their state of decay and because deep mud around the lake is preventing access.

"The sheer scale of the incident up there at the moment and the number of fish that have died means that there isn't any option other than some attempt to remove the fish," he said.

"Unfortunately that hasn't been successful and under the current conditions is unlikely to be successful.

"If the conditions were to change so that access to the water was possible - if the mud was to dry out and harden to enable vehicles to access it, that sort of thing - unfortunately that's probably not going to happen during the time the fish decompose, but we are evaluating that each day."