Opening your window in the early morning and being seized by bad smells is not always pleasant. It’s even less so when you don’t know who to contact to find out what’s going on or to stop it. So to not just say to your next-door neighbor: “It stinks this morning, doesn’t it? », Atmo Grand-Est, association approved by the Ministry of Ecological Transition for air quality monitoringhas set up a digital platform.
Baptized until recently ODO, the application managed by the Atmo Grand Est agency has evaporated since this month of March and has evolved. She is now called SignalAir. While the old version, launched in November 2020, concerned the territory of the Strasbourg-Kehl-Ortenau Eurodistrict, mainly Strasbourg and the border town of Kehl in Germany, the SignalAir system now extends to the entire region. Great East. And that should feel good for the new platform, because Strasbourg and Kehl alone have, since the end of 2020 to date, more than 1,400 reports. These are essentially the eastern sectors of the city such as the Neudorf, the Orangerie-Council of the XV, the Robertsau near the oil port, the Port du Rhin, according to the statements of Atmo-Grand-Est.
“The goal is citizen participation”
Smell from the garbage cans of the local restaurant, from the incineration center in the area, from a sanitation problem, everything can be reported. A great step forward knowing that olfactory nuisances appear to be the second reason for complaint after noise, according to Atmo… The fact remains that if signaling is good, acting is even better. “The goal is citizen participation,” explains Eric Herber, research engineer at Atmo Grand-Est. Before the platform, there were several telephone numbers within the Eurometropolis, the city, Kehl, Atmo Grand-Est. So requests went randomly to these structures, which complicated the processing of reports. The idea is therefore to centralize them all in order to be able to act effectively”.
Concretely, the report “is done easily with automatic geolocation in less than a minute”, promises Eric Herber again. After downloading the free application, you must enter four criteria, such as perception (nuisance felt as a puff or continuously), the intensity of the smell, the level of discomfort and its evocation (smell of burning, rotten egg, hydrocarbons). It is also possible to leave a comment.
Small flat, which can be frustrating, “there is no individual return”, warns Eric Herber. It is the grouping of important reports on a sector that will trigger an action, “but we cannot respond individually to each report”. The intention was originally to establish “a map of problematic sectors”, further details the expert. And to continue: “we needed to be able to identify the nuisances in order to finally work on their sources with the services concerned. There’s no straight answer but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on behind it. It is also possible to consult the analysis report on the Atmo-Grand-Est website.
Map, identify, then inform the structure or structures likely to solve the problem. For manufacturers, this can go through the Regional Directorate for the Environment, Planning and Housing (Dreal). “For a problem over a short period, over very marked episodes, over the short term, we can also bring around the table the various partners and players in the territory to quickly take action”, specifies Eric Herber. It can also go through the prefecture, as was the case last summer in Illkirch-Graffenstaden, a city bordering Strasbourg. “After several reports, the tool made it possible to identify that there was an olfactory problem on the territory, explains Eric Herber, to raise it with the prefect who set up a prefectural decree in relation to an industrialist. For a sanitation problem, the smell of garbage cans in a restaurant, it can be one of the services of the community that intervenes as quickly as possible”. And be careful, because “we often tend to stigmatize the industry, notes the expert, but there are also olfactory problems linked to other sources, in particular agricultural activity, catering, sanitation, burning waste in the open air. »