Air quality and odour

What you must do

If dust or odour from your work causes a nuisance to the surrounding community, your local council can limit or even stop you working. They can restrict:

  • the type of machinery you use 
  • your working hours.

Failure to address a dust or odour problem could result in legal action and a fine.

If your process is regulated under the Environmental Permitting regime in England and Wales or the Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) regime in Northern Ireland and Scotland your permit may require you to control emissions of:

  • dust 
  • odour 
  • nitrogen oxides 
  • sulphur dioxide.

You must find out if you need an environmental permit or a PPC permit.

Subject to certain exemptions, you are committing an offence if you cause or permit the emission of dark smoke from a chimney or bonfire.

Good practice

If you carry out activities that create dust, eg grinding, you should connect the exhaust gases to suitable arrestment equipment such as cyclones. This will reduce the amount of dust you emit to the atmosphere.

Clean up spills of solid materials immediately. You should vacuum up spills or damp them down before you manually clean them up. Do not hose spills down drains.

Reduce the number of places where you move materials on your site. This will reduce your emissions to air, especially from dusty materials.

Regularly maintain your pollution abatement equipment. For example have empty and clean cyclones to make sure they work at optimum efficiency.

Dealing with complaints

Keep a record of:

  • any complaints you receive about dust and odour
  • the results of investigations into the cause
  • what you have done about the complaint.

Ensure that you deal with complaints promptly and appropriately. Use this information to improve your procedures to prevent similar complaints in the future. Keep the complainant informed throughout your investigation.

Bulk storage silos

To prevent emissions of dust and odour from your bulk storage silos, you should vent them to suitable treatment plant such as bag filters or backvent them to the delivery tanker.

To prevent overfilling fit bulk storage silos with a high level alarm or volume indicator.