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By Tim Sprinkle
Oct 13, 2025
There was something different in the air around New York City in the early 2000s. A smell. It wasn’t trash; it wasn’t car exhaust. It smelled like…maple syrup. And not just a little bit. The sticky-sweet odor of everyone’s favorite pancake topping wafted over the city off and on for years, until in 2009 researchers finally got to the bottom of it.
The culprit? Factories across the river in New Jersey where fenugreek seeds were being processed for use in fragrances and food additives were identified as the probable source of the smell. In his announcement of the findings in 2009, then-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said: "Given the evidence, I think it's safe to say that the 'Great Maple Syrup Mystery' has finally been solved.”
But environmental odors like this are not always humorous – and can be dangerous. Aromas, both pleasant and noxious, are common across many different industries and can cause a wide range of problems, from factory smells drifting downwind, to product odors that offend customers, to olfactory conditions that make it difficult for employees to work. Environmental odors are a concern both indoors and outdoors, and can become serious community and business issues when left unchecked. Persistent odors from industry, agriculture, or waste sites lead to complaints, regulatory action, and damaged trust between companies and neighbors, not to mention the potential health issues. Often, people assume that if it smells bad, it must be unsafe, fueling public anxiety. New York’s maple syrup smell, for instance, was at one time considered to be potentially harmful to residents, though later testing proved it to be harmless.
READ MORE: 6 Standards Making a Difference for the Environment
In order to develop a strategic approach to dealing with the many different types of environmental odors, ASTM International’s committee on air quality (D22) recently proposed the new practice for environmental odor assessment (WK72782) to help assess these challenges using an analytical, odorant-prioritization-based approach.
In announcing the new standard, committee member Jacek Koziel said: “The approach in the proposed standard has emerged for its developers from 30 years of practical application to real-world industrial and consumer odor-quality problem-solving. The diversity of targeted odorous environments has ranged from agricultural to industrial to consumer products.”
The effort to develop an environmental odor standard is a long time coming, as odor analysis has largely been treated as a curiosity, not a rigorous, scientific problem-solving process. As a result, many industrial odor investigations have been crisis-driven and lack consistency or standardization.
“When you’re dealing with odor problems in industry, if you’ve got a product that has a malodor and you’re in the business of selling that product, you really don’t have a choice — you’ve got to solve that problem,” says committee member Don Wright, who has spent a career working on odor analysis using multidimensional gas chromatography. “We found that if we can trace an odor character-defining compound back to its source, the roadway and distance to a solution can be much shorter.”
The methodology being codified in the proposed standard formalizes a structured, analytical approach to isolate the chemical culprits behind odors. This will allow researchers to more quickly narrow down potential odor-causing compounds instead of chasing every possible option, which wastes time and too often misses the root cause of a smell.
“It’s not necessary to define the extremely complex background that accompanies these critical players. What we need to do is find if there’s a character-defining compound that’s hidden in that complex emission from that source that is primarily responsible for the problem. We’ve learned to not look at the noise that accompanies these critical compounds.”
The new standard is being designed as an initial screening tool meant to identify simple, obvious causes of odor problems before investing time and resources in more complex analyses or data-heavy investigations. In that way, it is considered a complement to existing odor standards that rely on human sensory panels, providing an additional chemical and diagnostic foundation for odor analysis.
The committee’s goal with WK72782 is not to replace other standards, which help to define what’s acceptable from a regulatory standpoint. The proposed standard is designed to help focus both monitoring and mitigation strategy development by taking an analytical approach to the problem.
“The general impression in the environmental odor arena is that odor is inherently complex, and it is if you look at all of the noise you collect in these environments,” Wright says. “But, as it turns out, that’s really not the case. In most cases, impactful odors can be relatively simple. It might only be a few compounds, or even a single character-defining compound causing the odor. That’s what this method specifically looks for: screening for low-hanging fruit. Let’s make sure there’s not a simple answer before we start generating much more data.” ●
