Action taken to cut smell problem from Riverside composting site

In the past few years, I have received numerous complaints from residents who live to the immediate north of the Riverside recycling centre and composting operation about the extent of the bad smell coming from the operation from time to time.

I have raised these concerns on numerous occasions with the City Council’s environment staff and undertook a site visit at their request to see the composting operation.   The council promised an environmental audit  to hopefully tackle the issue to minimise any further smell issues and I have received the following update from the City Council in the past few days :

Just an update to let you know that we had our PAS 100 audit of the 14 week process a few weeks ago and we shall shortly receive our new accreditation. 

Site staff have been making PAS 100 compliant 14 week compost for some weeks now and all material through the site will be made to this standard. We aren’t able to dispatch this until we receive our certification. The 26 week process will be rendered obsolete.

We have generally found we now only require to turn windrows once during sanitisation and once during stabilisation.  Previously we would have turned windrows twice/three times during both sanitisation and stabilisation and once during maturation. This has reduced the need for turning from 6/7 turns down to 1/2.

Furthermore we have also been trialling shredding more frequently to avoid waste sitting longer on site than required. Again this has proven successful. 
We continue to have our annual bio-aerosol survey carried out and look at our control measures that we have in place. We received our latest report last month.

Finally we received our results of SEPA’s compliance scheme for each of our licensed waste management sites relating to environmental performance for 2016. As our regulator this information is made publicly available on SEPA’s website.  I am pleased to report that all waste management sites including Riverside once again have been rated excellent (SEPA assess the licence holder as fully compliant with the licence conditions).

I hope this re-enforces our efforts to minimise any environmental issues from the site.

I am hoping that this marks a real improvement in the situation going forward although I would ask residents to contact me should they have any issues regarding any smell nuisance from the site in the coming months.