Odor-Control Company Whiffing the Sweet Smell of Success

PITTSBURGH —  Let other entrepreneurs fiddle with flower shops. Arnold Zlotnick devotes his energies to the armpits of the nation: the sewage plant, the landfill and the smokestack.

His company is on a mission to deodorize. And apparently, no stench is too strong to tackle.

“You try to get to the source, the source, the source,” said Zlotnick, president of Surco Products Inc.

Surco has established about 350 chemical compounds to counteract different stinks, and last year’s sales were about $9 million.

While countless odor-control companies serve their regions, only about five operate nationally as Surco does, and they battle less over territory than philosophy.

Some spritz the malodor with the industrial equivalent of perfume. Others trap the offending molecules before they can reach the nose. Surco’s main philosophy is counteracting, which is adding a second smell designed to produce a neutral odor that may smell like nothing else.

“Since they don’t recognize it, they don’t notice it,” said Ray Czapko, Surco’s marketing director.

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Heyl & Patterson, a Pittsburgh engineering firm, hired Surco after trying to help a major brewer devise a way to recycle filtering material. The material was full of brewer’s yeast, and when the engineers tried to dry it with heat, the stuff burned.

“It ended up smelling like something out of the Pittsburgh Zoo,” said Mike Turbeville, a Heyl & Patterson engineer who almost gave up beer as a result.

Rather than pay public fines, the firm called Surco and ended up smelling like an orange grove.

More often, an industry calls for odor control after complaints from citizens or orders from the government. If the problem is a smelly smokestack, Surco might spray the output with counteractants. At a landfill, the company might install pipes around the perimeter that spray the counteractants at the problem.

Is American industry ripe for deodorizing? Odor controllers say yes, mostly due to increased public awareness that a bad smell may indicate pollution.

“Cities and states and local authorities are getting stronger and stronger in telling them, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” and solutions are getting cheaper, said Phil Coffey, president of Odor Management Inc. in Barrington, Ill., outside Chicago.

Stenches are a leading topic of phone calls to the Atlanta office of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, spokesman Hagan Thompson said.

Also, as the suburbs expand, people move closer to sewage plants and landfills that once lined the edge of town.

Smell company executives said they would not counteract a smell from a dangerous chemical or illegally high pollution.

But Joe Minott, executive director of the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia, said he is still worried that counteracting an odor may remove one of the few tools--the nose--that a community has to monitor air quality.

“If you’ve ever talked to a community that lives next to a sewage treatment plant, they can tell by the nature of the odor what company has been dumping stuff in the system,” Minott said.

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Still, what smells good to some people smells bad to others, depending on where they were born. Body odor horrifies Americans, Britons and Japanese, but attracts the French, said Annette Green, president of the Olfactory Research Fund Ltd. in New York, which funds odor research.

And, she said, researchers have discovered that humans can change our opinion of what smells bad. Creolin, which once lent its medicinal smell to PineSol brand household cleaner, used to stink. Now, it reminds some of us of being a child in grandmother’s kitchen. To take advantage of the nostalgia, some manufacturers that no longer use creolin re-create its odor in their products.

The sense of smell tires quickly. Minutes after we put on cologne, we may think it has lost its power and put on more.

“Even people who live in very horrible-smelling neighborhoods, if they live there long enough, they don’t even know it,” Green said.

The nose behind Surco is Zlotnick’s own, substantial schnoz, which sometimes works in an aroma laboratory containing more than 2,000 smells. When too many odors confuse his nose, he pauses to refresh it by inhaling over coffee beans.

He delighted in holding various vials up to a visitor’s nostrils, and he offered whiffs from several bottles, none smelling very good, that add up to new-car smell, a product he said is popular with used-car dealers. That distinctive smell, incidentally, has changed since the 1960s because car makers are using new plastics.

Zlotnick’s nose is so well-trained that he can tell you, he claims, whether the vanilla before him is used in Breyer’s ice cream or Dreyer’s.

“You can’t go to school for this,” he said.

As with everybody, there are smells Zlotnick can’t smell. In his case, it’s the mercaptan family.

“Some people may not be able to smell mints. Some people may not be able to smell citrus,” Zlotnick said.

On the whole, though, one might prefer to lack the ability to smell mercaptan. It’s the operative ingredient in a skunk’s spray.