The wealthy Silicon Valley tech center of Milpitas, California, has an odour issue, as reported by the BBC news.
Residents have had to put up with foul odours emanating from industrial sites, including a 342-acre landfill, for decades.
Chia-Ling Kong, an engineer for a tech company who lives about half a mile from the dump, says, "I could not open my window for over ten years when I first moved here."
Kong claims that although things have improved recently, she and her neighbours still have to deal with "two or three hours of bad smells a day."
The community is placing its hopes in technology, which may be fitting for Silicon Valley.
Perhaps befitting Silicon Valley, the community is putting its hopes in technology.
The operators of Newby Island landfill have been ordered by local authorities to use drones and install monitors to systematically track and measure the chemicals responsible for bad odours. They have also been told to automate the collection of landfill gases responsible for smells.
Kong is optimistic a data-driven approach would make a difference. "Hopefully with this continuous monitoring, it makes it easier to pinpoint problems at the moment it starts."
The operators of the landfill say they are committed to operating it safely and protecting air quality.
Just like in Milpitas, where Kong is part of a citizen's campaign against the odours, communities around the world are raising a stink about bad smells making day-to-day life miserable. Sometimes a rubbish dump is to blame, or it might be a sewage treatment works, or a reeking factory.
When the complaints start stacking up, resolving them is not always simple. Many countries have no regulations in place dictating how to manage smells.
In the US, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate environmental odours as a pollutant. This leaves states and local governments to take charge of the issue.
Urban sprawl is often part of the problem, bringing communities closer to stinky facilities that may historically have been kept at a distance.
This is creating more demand for technologies to monitor and prevent smells. Odour consultant, Micheal Bull says people are increasingly concerned about neighbourhood stinks.
The technologies used to tackle industrial pongs generally fall into three categories: they absorb odours; convert them into something less smelly through a chemical reaction; or burn them away.
Experts on fixing industrial odours say that the best technologies, when used correctly, can remove 90% or more of the target compounds responsible for smells.
But this can be expensive and some operators opt for simpler and cheaper solutions. These include masking odours from landfill or sewage processing by spraying giant quantities of deodorisers.
