Lombardy will finance the development of a public platform for odour reporting

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LombardyDCR   The Regional Council of Lombardy, Italy, published a D.C.R. (Deliberazione Consiglio Regionale) on the 28th of July 2020, for the funding of the development of a platform to implement a control and monitoring system for odorous inputs. The decision of the Regional Environmental Administration of Lombardia was taken after studying the results of the first successful project of mapping odours developed by the Italian Regional Environmental Administration of Marche.

   The idea is to develop an app to register odour observations by citizens so that the environmental regulator can make informed decisions with real time data is not new. There are many applications in the market developed for this purpose, and we have seen how successful this tool is in projects not only in Italy but in many other countries such as the USA, Norway, Australia, Germany, or Spain, to say a few examples of a trend that it is growing rapidly around the world. What it is however new here, is that for the second time, an Environmental Administration has taken the decision of develop an app rather than acquiring it from a private company.

   The old D.G.R. n. IX/3018/2012 "General determinations regarding the characterization of gaseous emissions into the atmosphere deriving from activities with strong odour impact" provided to each Mayor of this region, with a procedure to be activated in case of multiple reports of odour complaints by citizens. However, due to the complexity of this procedure published on 2012, and the success of the project in Falconara with the app Odor.Net developed by ARPA Marche, the Regional Council of Lombardy has decided to extend the project to the whole regional territory with the publication of this Agenda for financial resources for the development of a platform to implement a control and monitoring system for odour nuisance, that will focus on:

  • Developing a pilot project for real-time monitoring of olfactory annoyance, on the basis of what ARPA Marche developed with Odor.Net, with the full involvement of ARPA Lombardia, starting from a particularly critical territory from the point of view of citizen reports of odour annoyance , also with the support of municipalities;
  • ensuring that the project foresees the development of a special APP, which can then be downloaded free of charge by citizens;
  • installing, in the second phase of the project, suitable sampling devices that can be activated remotely, based on the reports received through the APP;
  • extending the project to the entire regional territory of Lombardy, once the "pilot" phase has been successfully completed;
  • constantly informing the competent Council Commission on the project phases and outcomes;
  • publishing all the results of the monitoring project on the ARPA Lombardia and Regione Lombardia website;
  • providing the appropriate financial resources available for the development of the Agenda.

    As mentioned, there will be a second phase where sampling devices remoted activated will be used to collect samples whenever a set of odour observations is recorded. These sampling devices are actually being very interesting when they are set at the fence line of the activities, where odour concentrations can be effectively measured by dynamic olfactometry.

   The ARPA Marche Odor.net project, started in July 2019, and after 15 months from the start, the 340 registered users have reported 2.157 odour reports through the app. You can read the last report here or get more information at the official site here.

   For more info, check the complete DCR (in Italian), here Bollettino Ufficiale Regione Lombardia on the 6th October 2020.

 

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Cyntia Izquierdo

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