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Scented mulch too much for one Brookline man

Jeff Egnaczyk begs of his hometown:

Brookline, can you chill OUT with the scented mulch. Why must a wood chip be scented?

Trish Fontanilla wonders if maybe Jeff is just getting his nostrils in a bunch over flowers, but Haley Rose agrees with Egnaczyk:

Seriously, my nose hurts.

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Comments

the only scented mulch I've ever heard of is the stuff that is made from the shells of the cocoa bean...it smells like chocolate!
Expensive tho.

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My sympathies are with Jeff Egnaczyk & Haley Rose. I work in a basement very close to an outdoor landscaping area at our workplace, and our office space is overwhelmed with the smell when the landscapers apply mulch every spring - enough to give us all sore throats. It usually dissipates after a day or so, but this year it lingered for a week.

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Because I'm trying not to get out of hand with the alliteration, but, now it's stuck in my head, and I need to get it out ...

Malodorous mulch makes man miserable

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Mulch Ado About Nothing?

Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com

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For some people, life is a constant conspiracy against them. Complaining about the smell of mulch? God forbid they should ever have to spend a day on a farm. They won't be happy until they're vacuum sealed in a freezer bag.

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I honestly don't get this. As far as I know there's no such thing as scented mulch. Mulch smells like mulch--barky, earthy, kind of funky but it's not a smell that lingers very long. I love it--smells like spring to me. Seriously...on the long list of things (and even smells) to complain about, this one seems pretty far down.

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It really depends. I, too, am fond of the pungent smell of cedar mulch when I smell it in passing outdoors. But as I described above, every year my indoor workspace is filled with the concentrated odor of fresh cedar mulch for at least a day. This year it lingered for a week. Concentrated in our basement office space, it's strong enough to cause headaches and sore throats, and it's inescapable. In that case, it stops "smelling like spring" and starts being pretty oppressive.

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An odor causes headaches and sore throats? How about an odor causes workers to sit all day thinking "I don't like this... I don't like this... I don't like this..." until eventually they give themselves headaches?

Believe it or not, some people (not those who spend their day in an office) actually deal with not 'smells' but nasty odors every day in their jobs. They don't whine about the smells, and they don't get headaches.

The problem here isn't mulch odors, it's Princess and the Pea smell-o-chondriacs who equate every perceived odor with poisons.

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What an idiot you sound like here. You think people who work in a hospital (like Allstonian) never ever ever deal with nasty odors? How do you figure that one?

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Your credentials in allergy and immunology(research or clinical) for us to better understand your sophisticated professional understanding of this subject.

No? You never studied anything like this? You don't even have the slightest clue what I'm talking about?

Okay. Then I think I know what smells around here - your opinions. You are entitled to them, sure, but everybody else is also entitled to make fun of the ignorance upon which they are based. After all, opinons are like ...

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As someone who has done research on asthma and allergens in work environments, I actually did note the date and time of application of mulch as a potential asthma/allergy trigger in studies of air quality and sick time.

Moreover, there were a number of landscapers who turned up in the clinic where my boss saw patients and guess what they were allergic to that was keeping them from sleeping because they couldn't breathe at night?

MULCH!

What's in mulch? Well, tree bark for one - that's a potential allergen. Certain species of wood dust are very well known as occupational allergy sensitizers - cedar is a big one! Then there are all the lovely microbes - the stuff is an endotoxin souffle! Then there are mold and fungi ... the list goes on and on.

So much for theories of "people are just whining because it doesn't bother me". The literature on occupational allergens would set you straight on that. Then again, there are people who still deny that cotton lung and black lung exist, despite pathology to the contrary.

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This comment is funny because:

a) You think a tweet to my 70 followers on Twitter (30 of which are spam accounts) constitutes a considerable amount of complaining.

b) You've already spilled more bits about it in the comment thread than I did in my tweet.

c) You don't know my high school was adjacent to a cow pasture, and my childhood home was across the street from the county fair grounds.

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... I'd bet its the cedar. Cedar would make it "scented" and is also a powerful allergen.

http://www.worksafebc.com/publications/health_and_...

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Don't get me wrong--mulch is some rancid stuff. Over my summers off from high school and college, I did landscaping work and I developed a deep hatred of the stuff. That vomit-like stench, the fact that the stench seems to get into your pores, the nasty steam when you stuck a pitchfork into a pile of it on crisp spring mornings (it can actually be hot-to-the-touch since the stuff is SWARMING with heat-producing anaerobic bacteria)--all disgusting.

That being said, I have some idea of how hyper-sensitive office employees can be about odors. Having worked with a governmental agency that handles space needs for other governmental agencies by leasing private space, it's worth noting that public employees and their unions (I'm generally pro-union, BTW) come up with some pretty ridiculous complaints to stir the pot when bargaining with government entities. All you need is somebody who thinks the air is stale, and whammo, it's a "sick building" and alarmists screech for the whole office to be moved. Public health technicians with serious diagnostic equipment, guys representing the government, which would have a real interest in negative results as grounds for a potential suit, seldom come up with anything measurable.

Once, I heard about an office where there were repeated complaints of a "foul, chemical odor." Basically, after all sorts of testing, it turns out that it was from another employee's daily microwaved lunches.

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Stinks.

Could you back that up with a link or two, or some data on the percentage of office investigations that wind up being something like garlicky food? Or are these just truthy things you have heard?

Get this straight:

office workers are not pansies
indoor air pollution and contamination are real and problematic
indoor air can concentrate pollutants through a workday due to air recycling

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I can't back up what I was told by the technician face-to-face by the technician with a link (I guess I haven't entirely become one with the Matrix yet). I also can't name specific agencies or buildings for professional reasons. I also made no statements about the overall percentage of complaints that wound-up being unfounded. In sum, I have no idea where this bile is coming from.

To address your points one-by-one (since, as I now understand, I am obligated to "get [them] straight"):

"office workers are not pansies." I never said that all of them were. You seem to be denying that any of them ever could be. I think we've all had experiences with squeaky-wheel types, and if you assume that white-collar/clerical employees are always, without fail, entirely honest or reasonable about their complaints, my hat is off to you and your un-broken faith in human nature.

"indoor air pollution and contamination are real and problematic" Please refer me to the portion of my post when I said they were not. I was merely saying that not all perceived indoor air pollution is actual indoor air pollution. There's such a thing as subjectivity, after all. In my current office, a woman was relocated because another employee claimed that her perfume was causing headaches--no other person near this woman's old desk or near her new one has ever had any similar complaint. People are not always reasonable in their expectations, as anybody with food service/customer service experience will tell you.

"indoor air can concentrate pollutants through a workday due to air recycling" True, particularly since in most modern office space, you can't exaclty crack open a window, hence the outbreaks of sinus infections and colds that often strike offices in Summer. Nobody's arguing with you on that point.

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... or have the wrong government union. because *my* union left me sitting in poo. the sewers back-flowed into the building. my office carpet was saturated. and both my agency and my union told me it was just fine and to quit whining.

oh, and when those little testing agencies came in with their serious diagnostic equipment? yeah, they confirmed what i knew all along -- there are some serious health risks to sitting in human waste.

so, how about we chill a little on the cushy life of pampered government workers? some of us litterally put up with *&^%$! all day long...

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As a former public employee, please understand that I am NOT calling public employees a bunch of entitled complainers. I also don't mean to knock anybody who has had an actual run-in with indoor pollution.

What I meant to say is that there are some hypersensitive people out there, and that backed-up sewage and an unpleasant odor from mulch are two different things.

Believe me, my old building was no prize either.

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Growing up and living in Brookline for most of my life, this is embarrassing. I do not understand what planet these people come from, where they think anyone gives a damn about their personal feelings on mulch. Oh wait, Brookline impeached Bush, and prohibited spanking. Ahh, I remember now, I took that class at Brookline High, you know, the one where they tell you that Brookline is better than everyone else.

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Brookline thinks its mulch don't stink.

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#RichPeopleProblems

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See "landscapers with severe asthma", above.

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Landscapers with sever asthma. That's like a blind movie reviewer. Or a deaf music critic.

Cripes.

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Well ... I dread the coming of "Spring" (such as it is these days) when the mulch is spread. Years ago, cedar mulch seemed to be in vogue, but now it all seems to be hemlock, which smells to me like puke.

As it happens, I live in an apartment directly next to a large area that gets mulched every year, and have to live with incipient nausea for the week or so it takes for the stench to fade (being too early in the season to close the windows and turn on the a/c). Fortunately, the local mulch was spread several weeks ago, so I am past the crisis. Of course, when I venture out, the danger still exists ...

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