Sewage Treatment Mystery May Be Solved
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The “rotten cabbage” odor near sewage treatment plants, whose source has been a mystery for decades, is probably the result of trace concentrations of dimethyl sulfoxide in wastewater, a German-American team reported online this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
DMSO, a common industrial solvent, is not itself odorous or toxic, but it can readily be converted to foul-smelling dimethyl sulfide by bacteria.
