Odour Control

Plant To Deal With Nuisance Odours

The industry’s best kept secret – Odour Control Solutions

How can Parsons help? We can help you if:

You are receiving regular visits from the Environment Agency over your odour emissions?
Your company has received an Abatement Notice
You feel unsure about BAT (Best Available Techniques)
The neighbours are complaining about the bad smell.
Want to clamp down on bad odour? Our odour control solutions can help you.

An odour scrubber is a system or device that is designed to remove unpleasant or dangerous odours from a gas or air stream using a liquid solution or solid media such as activated carbon, to adsorb and capture on the media surface, or absorb into the liquid and chemically neutralise the odorous substances.

Parsons have the experience

Odour control is a complex and subjective issue when compared to Chemical fume scrubbing.

In chemical scrubbing, the process dictates the likely discharge to the atmosphere and so determining the inlet concentration is relatively straightforward. Once determined the scrubber outlet pollutant concentration required to meet the Environment Authority emissions requirements is quantifiable by Parsons Chemical Engineers using standard stoichiometric equations and calculations. Thus, the design parameters can be agreed. Once the chemical scrubber system is commissioned, the parameters can be checked at the scrubber gas discharge during the plant handover. Chemical scrubbing deals with a limited number of chemicals.

Odour control is a little different as you are dealing with a smell which is detected by the human nose and that in itself is subjective. Odour scrubbing deals with a large number of odorous gas species. As the odour may be emanating from a meat processing plant there is no easy way to determine the composition and the odorous compounds therein. There are so many odorous compounds (such as volatile organic compounds – VOCs) and the only way to detect them initially is with the human nose. The most common measurement of smell/odour is the Odour Unit.

The problem is, everyone has a different sense of smell, hence it is very subjective. The normal procedure to determine the level of nuisance is to do odour sampling and then using laboratory analysis, arrive at a range of components, normally using a Gas Chromatography (GC) technique. This is expensive and only takes a snapshot at a point in time, and then a view has to be taken as to the odorous compounds present, and this is sometimes then given as a hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) equivalent. It is then necessary to issue a specification to confirm the inlet odour concentration and select the required outlet concentration to ensure there is no further nuisance when the odour scrubber is installed.

Parsons Clean Air have a different approach. Having had years of experience on which to draw upon, not only designing and building scrubber systems but also operating and maintaining the systems, we have a huge amount of benchmarking data. When we receive an enquiry for an odour scrubber we select a range of equipment that has sufficient flexibility such that once installed we can tune it to the optimum performance. We then sample the discharge from the scrubbing system by smelling it and then allow the customer to operate the plant over a 6 to 12 month period during which time we visit site every 4 weeks to ensure the equipment is in optimum condition by regular servicing and chemical dosing calibration.

During the same period the Environment Agency Inspectors can visit site and record for themselves if the equipment is removing the odour to an acceptable level to ensure there are no further complaints. Once the equipment performance has been demonstrated, the client can continue renting the equipment which is then maintained and serviced by Parsons to ensure it continues to operate satisfactorily, and Parsons also attend to any emergency breakdown. Alternatively the client can purchase an identical system to the rental system in the knowledge that it will conform with the requirements of the Environment Agency. Parsons would then offer a process guarantee for the scrubber system following this trial period, and if the odour concentrations data is available beforehand, Parsons offer the process guarantee as part of the scrubber system specification.

Do you want to learn more about how we can help you solve odour issues? Read our article here.

Odour Control Experience

Parsons have the perfect odour control solution

At Parsons, we carry forty-plus years of proven, valuable experience in the odour control industry.

At Parsons, we have one aim: ‘No offensive odour beyond the boundary”. This then means the client stops receiving complaints from neighbours. On sites which are maintained by Parsons, no recorded odour breaches have been logged to date.

At Parsons, we supply odour control plants to many different industries:

– Meat Processing
– Chicken processing
– Fish Processing
– Cooked Food Plants
– Waste Water Treatment Works
– Pet food production
– Casing Processors
– Animal Rendering Plants
– Sewage Treatment
– Abattoirs
– Organic Waste Processing
– Oil refineries
– Pulp and Paper Industry
– Minerals Processing

You can read about it here.

Parsons odour scrubbers include hydrogen sulfide scrubbers (H₂S Scrubbers). H₂S is a colourless, corrosive, toxic and flammable gas, and has a characteristic rotten egg odour. H₂S gas is generated from processes such as organic decomposition during organic waste processing, sewage treatment, minerals processing of sulfur containing minerals, oil refineries, as well as from the pulp and paper industry as a natural byproduct of sulfate (Kraft) pulping processes.

Unfortunately, due to the many factors we must consider before designing an odour control plant, we cannot offer a ‘Click Here, pay online or deliver tomorrow’ service.

We design and build our odour scrubbing plants ready for order. Through careful design, we tailor every odour scrubber to the needs of our customers. Needless to say, lead times can vary. If you require a control plant swiftly, we can offer you the option of near-immediate installation. This option is available through our Plant Rental department.

Please give our sales department a call, who should be able to help with your queries from “Is it possible?”. You can also get in touch with us via the Contact Form below.