For the past few months, those at Diamond Pet Foods of Ripon have been trying to find a solution on eliminating any foul odor.

Their efforts continued despite some recent complaints of smell from the plant by the community. At Tuesday’s Ripon City Council meeting, Ken Zuidervaart, who is the director of planning, provided an update on this odor abatement project.

“They’ve been doing pilot testing,” he said.

Action thus far included the completion of source testing of the wet cyclone exhaust as part of the pending air permit application, according to Diamond’s summary of activities and progress report for June.

Diamond has hosted site visits along with process tours for the add-on odor control system suppliers while reviewing the proposal for pilot scale testing of that odor control system on the four process exhausts.

Diamond recently inked a contract with an equipment vendor to deploy and test the add-on odor control technology.

Future plans will consist of performing the pilot scale testing of the add-on odor control technology set for later this month. Based on the result of that, Diamond will to do a dispersion modeling in an effort to estimate the odor reductions upon implementing the chosen abatement system.

From there, depending on how the above plays out, Diamond could place an order for fabrication along with installation of the add-on odor control systems as part of a planned stepwise approach to solving the odor problem.

 Diamond Pet Food opened over a year ago, remaining busy since by rolling out 130 to 140 truckloads of product each week while operating three processing lines. Kibbles of pet food are processed here using factory-controlled computers.

Odor from the plant was reported back in October.

In March, elected leaders and Diamond officials began to look at solutions to the problem. Included were talks of extending the roof-top stacks by 10 feet in order to get the exhaust higher into the atmosphere as a way of dispersing the odor before it reaches the ground.