How to Manage a Project of Citizen Science: Olfactory Annoyance Evaluation in Taranto City (Italy)

摘要

Odour annoyance represents one of the most emerging aspects related to odour emissions, produced by industrial plants and constitutes an indicator of an unhealthy environment, strongly felt by population. Odour emission is considered as one of the most important causes of population complaints and its evaluation represents a matter characterized by great complexity. The management of the complaints of the citizens, living in the surroundings of odour sources, represents a very hard topic to face for public authorities. Taranto city, located in the South of Italy, is seriously afflicted by a strong environmental pollution produced by the different plants in the industrial area. In this area a project of citizen science has been applied by means of an experimental methodology for the detection and evaluation of olfactory annoyance, called Odortel; it is able to integrate automatic remote systems in order to record the olfactory perception of human receptors and to collect odour samples in real time. In this project citizens play a key role to alert the public authority by means of a phone switchboard, communicating in real time the perception of odor events and their intensity. The application of Odortel in the area of Taranto has permitted, for the first time, to manage the population complaints in a systematic way, to prove the refinery as the source and, at the same time, to perform improvements in sampling-analysis process.