Max Hatzoglou
Sunshine North paint manufacturer AkzoNobel held its fifth community forum last Wednesday night to address the issue of smell and noise from its 66-year old factory.
Since late 2019 residents in Sunshine North and surrounding areas have called for greater action to reduce the implications of the factory’s odor and noise to the community yet it still remains to be an issue years on.
Site manager Peter Black says the company has made some changes to improve the odor issues by installing a regenerative thermal oxidizer (RTO) although it admits more work and time is needed for better improvements.
“It takes time [to fix these issues] because a lot of these solutions require engineering solutions that require a lot of study,” Mr Black said.
“You want to make sure your solutions are going to solve the problem and fix the problem so you need to make sure the solution you put in place is going to have an improvement.”
The company has found noise easier to regulate through changing its operational hours to seven to seven, six days a week avoiding disturbing noises to the neighborhood at night.
Since then the company has brought in acoustic specialists who identified high noise sources in the factory from site analysis and changes have been made accordingly.
“We have already identified the highest noise emitting sources and have made changes, so that might be, changing out a pump, location of a piece of equipment, installing acoustic channels to reduce the noise,” he said.
“We have an action plan to continue working on that.”
Last week’s online community forum was attended by 27 people.
Residents surrounding the factory can expect to see improvement in noise before odor smells as action plans are set to be implemented for noise reduction by the end of the year.
“With the odor situation we have just finished a report and we are finalising that,” Mr Black said.
“We are going through that investigation process to see what the best solution is for that.
“We are not where we need to be.
“We have been here since 1955 so we have been a member of community for a long time and we certainly want to remain as a really valued member of the community.”
