Zero Odour Advisory Group - Part 1 - The Experiment

“It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work” - Jeff Bezos - Amazon.com

This article is the 1st of 3 articles:

• ZOAG - Part 1 - “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work” - Jeff Bezos - Amazon.com
• ZOAG - Part 2 - “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”- Thomas Alva Edison 
• ZOAG - Part 3 - “The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience.” - Roger Bacon -English philosopher and Franciscan friar

The purpose of these articles is to illustrate the use and value of Participation Action Research (PAR) methodology for engaging a composting company, local residents and the environmental regulator in a technical research effort to find the cause of composting odours and fix it. As the architect and facilitator, this is my description and analysis of the Zero Odour Advisory Group (ZOAG), an advisory committee, that worked to reduce odour emissions from a composting plant in London, Ontario. 

This is not a case study per se but rather a story, told from my perspective as the architect and team leader, of what we did, what worked, what didn’t work and a few of my wishes about things we could/should have done differently. I have included direct quotes from the participants to give you a taste of the discussions, a sense of the participant’s feelings about the issues and how important the issues were to them. Participation action research is about involving the participants “as full partners and co-researchers”. 

The Dutch owners saw this as an experiment because they had never encountered this type or degree of resident participation in one of their projects. The residents were understandable sceptical because they had been “burned” too many times by promises in the past that didn’t pan out. But they were willing to suspend their disbelief if this experiment would solve the odour problem. The MOE wanted a solution to the endless complaints about composting odours and was willing to “think outside the box” of the traditional public liaison committee (PLC) approach. No, I hoped, but I did not know if it would work.

I leave it to you, the reader to determine if you think the experiment was “worth the candle”.

Genesis

Orgaworld -London (Ontario) is a composter using “Dutch oven” or tunnel-type technology to process green bin waste from municipalities like the Region of York. The building was purchased by the Dutch firm Orgaworld and renovated to their European specs for aerobic composting. It was designed to receive and process organics including solid source-separated organics, leaf and yard waste, food wastes, commercial waste (restaurant wastes, etc.) and other sludges - all in response to provincial requirements for diversion of materials from landfill sites.

It was designed for a technical capacity to process up to a maximum of 1,000 tonnes per day and 150.000 tonnes per year. But because of odour complaints from residents and commercial operations in the area of the facility, the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) had ordered Orgaworld to reduce the amount of waste processed to a level less than its designed capacity. The Environmental Protection Act prohibits the discharge, or causing or permitting the discharge of contaminants into the natural environment that cause or may cause an adverse effect (odours emitted that have a detrimental impact on one’s use and enjoyment of property may be deemed an adverse effect).

Frustrated by these difficulties, the company retained us to see if we could help.

Stakeholder Sensitivity Analysis

We started off by personally interviewing the residents and businesses in the Shaver-Brockley community of the City of London. Now bear in mind, the Shaver-Brockley community is a sparsely populated area - less than 150 residents and businesses. As you can see from our aerial photo, Orgaworld was/is located in a semi-rural area of London. 

The Residents’ Perspective

Our interviews quickly revealed the extent of the odour problem. From the beginning of operations in June ‘07, residents said they had experienced odours from Orgaworld’s processing of organic wastes. 

• Residents characterized the Orgaworld odours as “a terrible choking smell that can gag you, bring tears to your eyes, dry your throat and give you headaches. It is a very distinctive odour that cannot be mistaken from other sources like the landfill site. “ We were told by some residents that the odour has been so bad on occasion that it has made them sick to their stomach and caused vomiting. 
• Residents said everyone gets their share of odour depending on wind direction. Different residents can detect the odour on different days depending on wind direction so not everyone can smell it on the same day. The odour varies in duration from a few hours to a day or so. Residents said they are in the habit of checking the wind direction each day , then they determine if they should plan any outdoor activities with their families. 

Residents told us that, depending on the severity of the odours on any given day, it resulted in them not being able to enjoy the outdoors:

• Some children complained about having to play indoors if the wind is blowing from the plant.
• Residents said they couldn’t plan outdoor social functions, sit out on their decks or even work for extended periods in their yards.
• We were told there are instances of residents being physically sick at a local gym and instances where outdoor jogging activities were limited by the odour situation.

Interviews with some of the local businesses found managers and owners are concerned about the odours and the adverse impacts it has on their customers. Although these managers and owners said they are reluctant to complain, their customers have not been shy about complaining to them.

• When ask about their reluctance to complain, we received comments such as “what good would it do”, “I have to get along with everyone in the community”, “ I did once but nothing came of it”.

Residents said they were at their wits’ end, perplexed and unable to think of what more they could do to get “zero odours”. In the early days of the plant, they participated in the regular meetings of the Public Liaison Committee in the hope that they could influence Orgaworld to address the early problems with odour. And they felt they were successful in getting Orgaworld to make some changes and investments like the construction of the covered structure for finished compost awaiting transportation. However, the odours continued to adversely affect their lives.

In short, they felt 3 years was enough time for Orgaworld to solve the problem. They are tired of being told it is not possible, that the residents don’t know what they are talking about and in the past, being talked-down-to in a condescending manner by Orgaworld officials. They wanted the odours to stop and they were searching for more effective means to force Orgaworld to move to zero odour and if that did not occur, they wanted the plant moved or shut down.

The company’s relationship with the residents/community was altered by a representative of the company who told the residents during start-up that”there would NO odours from the plant”. In our interviews with Orgaworld we were told that this former Vice President made an incorrect statement. Needless to say, this early statement about no odour did not help with the relationships with the residents. 

Orgaworld’s Perspective

As I mentioned in the lead up to this article, Orgaworld’s Dutch owner and management were bewildered (perhaps not the right word but the only one that comes to mind) by the residents’ concerns and constant stream of complaints about odours from their plant. They told me that they never had these problems with their plants in The Netherlands. And residents near their plants in The Netherlands accepted any composting odours as the price they paid for environmentally beneficial results of composting. Furthermore, they told us that they do not know of any plant in the world that does not produce some odour. 

Orgaworld officials told us that the regulatory requirements for odour control/abatement are, in their opinion, the most stringent in the world. And they are used to a regulatory regime in which, if they are meeting the standards, they are deemed to be in compliance and do not have to deal with this unique Ontario concept of “adverse effects”. This concept of “adverse effects” is especially problematic for composting operations

Notwithstanding their perceptions of the differences between The Netherlands and Ontario, the owner did recognize “that things had not rolled out the way they expected...in March and April we had a very bad situation, that’s for sure.”

It is important to note that, although the residents were not satisfied with the company’s responses, Orgaworld did respond to the residents’ odour complaints by implementing a number of fixes to the building and the composting process:

• Leakage of odour from the building was corrected by sealing gaps between the siding and the plant’s supporting structure. This was intended to achieve negative pressure and contain fugitive odours.
• Constructed an enclosed shelter, outside the plant, to prevent dispersion of odours from the storage of finished compost Odours 
• An ammonia scrubber system was added to improve the proper working of the biofilter and bioscrubber systems
• The monitoring system falsely indicated that the biofilters were being sprayed. As a result, biofilters dried out which resulted in increased odours being released into the atmosphere. The biofilter media was replaced with fresh media and a new additional biofilter was installed.
• Unexpected equipment failure - Orgaworld experienced further odour problems when the duct work carrying air to the biofilters fell from the ceiling due to improper installation. This compromised the odour abatement systems which caused the release of composting odours into the atmosphere. The duct work carrying air to the biofilters had to be replaced.

The company felt they have done a lot to address odour problems, have improved significantly and spent money voluntarily doing so (the notion of voluntarily was disputed by the residents who felt every change has had the Ministry of the Environment’s persuasive hand in the background). Nevertheless, Orgaworld officials told us that they will continue to do their best to succeed. 

The Orgaworld Organics Processing Facility Public Liaison Committee

The MOE required the company to establish a Public Liaison Committee -called the “Orgaworld Organics Processing Facility Public Liaison Committee” and was subsequently referred to as the PLC. The mandate of the PLC was described as follows:

• “Establishment and operation of the PLC is a voluntary initiative by Orgaworld, which is committed to a positive and constructive relationship with the general public and with owners and tenants of properties located in the vicinity of the facility.”

Residents described the PLC as the primary tool available to the residents to advocate for improvements in the odour abatement system at Orgaworld. Although virtually everyone involved described the PLC meetings as animated, sometimes heated and often contentious, the residents were disappointed and angry when the independent chairman resigned and Orgaworld stopped convening the meetings.

Representatives from the MOE and the Middlesex-London Health Unit said the PLC had problems with how it was managed, the quality of the minutes, the lack of advance agendas, the discussion rules, etc. Discussions were often dominated by certain individuals and very little progress was made. Orgaworld felt the meetings had deteriorated into little more than complaint sessions and therefore of little value. 

After the demise of the PLC, the ministry invited Orgaworld and the residents to a series of “intimate meetings” to re-open communication channels and get the discussions started again. They apparently were critical steps in the process that led to the hiring of Ogilvie, Ogilvie & Company.

Stakeholder Sensitivity Analysis - What worked, didn’t work and wishes

• The SSA revealed a group of residents who had been wrestling with the odour problem for 3 years and there were a lot of things said by both the company and the residents themselves that were contaminating the potential for moving forward.
• The local businesses did not want to get involved lest they be perceived in the wrong light.
• The existing PLC had become a forum of frustration for both the company and the residents. 
• Mistrust between the owner and the residents was palpable.
• It would take considerable time and many conversations with the owner and the residents to figure out a mutually acceptable process before we even began to talk about the causes of the odour and fixes.
• With this amount of bad blood and excess baggage, none of the traditional facilitation approaches were going to work. We needed to change the company’s and the residents’ behaviour while they still complained to/about each other. 

Towards a Participatory Action Research Model/Approach

Edward de Bono in his book on Conflict says.....“I find no villains but intelligent people locked by logic and their positions into the argument/clash mode...There are three roads to conflict resolution: fight/litigate; negotiate/bargain; and design a way out....The design road demands a third party that can look at the situation from a third party perspective...”

So we endeavoured to see if we could “design a way out of this conflict” about composting odours.

We opted for a participatory action research (PAR) model. Participatory research gained popularity in the 70s. The sociologist Orlando Fals Borda described participatory research in the following way:

•  “Do not monopolise your knowledge nor impose arrogantly your techniques, but respect and combine your skills with the knowledge of the researched or grassroots communities, taking them as full partners and co-researchers. ... Do not impose your own ponderous scientific style for communicating results, but diffuse and share what you have learned together with the people, in a manner that is wholly understandable, for science should not be necessarily a mystery nor a monopoly of experts and intellectuals.”

PAR has had a lasting impact in projects ranging from problem solving in the workplace to community development to education, public health, feminist research and civic engagement. The PAR principle of “taking them as full partners and co-researchers”  as opposed to consulting the residents whenever forced to be the regulator or pressured by some scathing account in the media. 

The Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal

In their best selling book “ Built to Last”, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras found that the best companies in the world all had something they called A “BHAG” - Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. The following are some real examples of BHAGs from their book and their website:

• Knock off RJR as the number one tobacco company in the world. ( Philip Morris)
• Crush Adidas. ( Nike)
• Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds. (Amazon)
• To become “the pulse of the planet. (Twitter)

A BHAG engages people - it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People “get it” right away, it takes little or no explanation - it has a clear finish line so the organization knows when it has achieved the goal. It is a mountain to climb. 

Find the cause of the odour and fix it.

Although not as dramatic as the examples above, we set ourselves the formidable task of “Find the cause of the odour and fix it”. Although we were sometimes haunted by our doubts “can we find the cause(s) of the composting odours and more importantly eliminate these odours?”, it had the potential of engaging the company, the residents and the regulator in an endeavour that was worthwhile. In effect, we thought that “biting the bullet” (i.e. putting ourselves on the line for solving the problem) might break the company, the residents and the regulator out of their argument/clash mode.

We were proposing a totally new approach that was based on jointly planning, jointly implementing and jointly evaluating the cause and solutions to the odour problems. Yes it was risky, no we didn’t know how to do it. It was clearly a situation covered by the adage “you can’t see the end from the beginning”.

 Jointly Developing a Path Forward- An “Accord”

We told the company that we thought we could help if they agreed to the following:

• we would design, provide independent technical expertise and facilitate a participatory research program that engaged all parties in a “search for the cause of the odours and fix it”;
• we would create a new advisory committee called the Zero Odour Advisory Group consisting of the company, the residents and the regulator. We would facilitate the committee in a manner that was open (members of the public could attend as observers), transparent in that all research, reports and summaries would be treated as public domain, respectful of all opinions and informed by the available science;
• the company would have to make the necessary financial commitments to implementing whatever building/process improvements were recommended.

To their credit, the owner of Orgaworld agreed.

We spent considerable time meeting with the potential members and talking about suggestions/ideas (and what people didn’t want) for how we would go about finding the cause and fixing it. Although we had a number of ideas from the SSA research, the key to success was to find a model that the members developed and felt they “owned”.

As a result of a series of exploratory meetings, suggestions and ideas of possible approaches emerged. We began assembling these suggestions and ideas into a draft outline and used this as the device for refining people’s thoughts and gradually moving forward. We began calling it an “accord” because it is was becoming a collective agreement by all the proposed members of how we were going to work together to find the cause and fix it. 

Without going into all the details of the 9 page document, the following highlights will give you an idea of what emerged:

• Zero Odour  - Orgaworld was committed to the goal of Zero Odour and agreed to “constructively engage” its neighbours in the pursuit of Zero Odour. This goal of Zero Odour was based on the well established philosophy of Zero Defect in the automotive industry. Zero Defect is not about being perfect. It is about the company changing their perspective so that they are continually thinking about preventing odours. And when odours do occur, finding what caused it and fixing it so it won’t happen because of that situation again. It does not mean there will never be another odour incident. Accidental odour incidents should be expected. But they will be the exception, not to be repeated and not a common occurrence.
• Expert Panel - We were authorized to conduct an independent expert consultation/ expert panel to evaluate the existing processing technology and give their best advice regarding the cause(s) of the odour and how to fix it.
• Trial Run or experiment - Permit Orgaworld to conduct a “trial run or experiment” of operating at optimal capacity to be evaluated in terms of the effect on odours. Orgaworld believed that odour incidents would be substantially reduced if the company is allowed to operate at its optimal tonnage. MOE did not agree with this hypothesis, hence the “trial run” experiment proposal. Such a trial run or experiment would have a detailed terms and conditions (a protocol governing the test/experiment) specifying the objectives, outcomes sought and evaluation measures and targets and methodologies, etc., jointly developed and agreed to by the ZOAG and monitored and enforced by the Ministry of the Environment.
• Health Effects - The Middlesex-London Health Unit agreed to conduct an independent review of the emissions data of Orgaworld’s plant. The objective of this commitment is to address the resident’s concerns about potential health effects from Orgaworld’s stack emissions. Although an earlier study of stack emissions completed by the company indicated that there was no risk of health effects, the resident’s would like a more current study/ review to be conducted given the changes in Orgaworld’s processing technology since the 1st study was done.
• Create a new Zero Odour Advisory Group (ZOAG) - Transform the PLC into a Zero Odour Advisory Group (ZOAG). The objective of this commitment was to create an advisory group that is broadly representative of all the major stakeholders that are willing to work constructively towards resolving the odour problem:
•  Orgaworld (2 members), 
• Residents in the area (6 members) , 
• Ministry of the Environment (3 members) -ex officio...including their in-house technical experts, 
• Middlesex London Health Unit (1 member), 
• A seat reserved for the City of London should they wish to participate (1 member) - City of London declined the invitation to be a member, opting instead for observer status and 
• Independent Public Facilitator (3 members) - Including Robb’s independent experts
• Residents’ Participation - For the period of the Accord, residents agree to work positively in helping Orgaworld solve the odour problems...this includes participating on ZOAG, agreeing not to give negative interviews or publish anti-Orgaworld messages or media articles unless and until it becomes clear that Orgaworld is not operating in good faith or honouring its commitments outlined in the Accord. The objective of this commitment is to seek the resident’s support for turning this confrontational situation into a constructive problem-solving effort aimed at resolving the odour problems of Orgaworld’s London plant.
• Independent Public Facilitator - Ogilvie, Ogilvie & Company was retained to proceed/facilitate/engage the parties with the timely implementation of the Accord. Given the technical nature of “finding the cause and fixing it”, we added Dr. Isobel Heathcote (our Associate expert in environmental assessment and environmental engineering) and Charlie Alix (consulting engineer from Boston in composting plants and their odour abatement) to the independent public facilitator’s team.

This Accord was intended as a work-in-progress, not an straight jacket. It was a device for launching the participation action research process. 

The Accord” - What worked, didn’t work and wishes

• Developing the “Accord” was time consuming with one step forward and two steps backward. But in the end, the participants came to a clear understanding about how they we going to tackle the challenges of finding the cause of the odour(s) and fixing it.
• Putting this common understanding on paper made it real. More importantly, each participant had an investment in one or more items described in the Accord. They each “owned” the Accord.
• We tried to get everyone to “sign” the Accord but the residents felt this was an attempt to tie their hands and “gag” them. We probably should have insisted on signatures because later in the project, one resident broke ranks and gave a negative interview to an out-of-town media outlet. The owner of the company saw this as a violation of the Accord and lost some faith in what was a fragile process.

This concludes ZOAG - Part 1 - “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work” - Jeff Bezos - Amazon.com. The next article is entitled ZOAG - Part 2 - “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”- Thomas Alva Edison and will describe what the ZOAG did to “find the cause of the odours and fix it”.