THE vexed question of why some brand-new carpets smell of cat urine, even in
feline-free households, has been answered.
Last year, a carpet manufacturer approached Jodi Martin of the Calgon
Corporation in Pittsburgh, saying that customers were complaining that their new
carpets smelled of cat urine. 鈥淚t鈥檚 something that pops up occasionally,鈥� says
Ken McIntosh of the Carpet and Rug Institute, in Dalton, Georgia.
Martin obtained samples of carpet, some with and some without the offending
odour. They couldn鈥檛 find any chemicals used to make the carpet that would
account for the smell, so they isolated bacteria from the samples and identified
the organisms using gas chromatography.
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The team found that all the foul-smelling samples contained large quantities
of anaerobic bacteria that emit a chemical called butyric acid. Many people feel
that butyric acid has a stench reminiscent of urine, says Martin, who presented
her research this week at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in
Los Angeles.
The bacteria are probably introduced into the carpet during manufacture and
it will take time to figure out how to prevent this, says Martin. But she thinks
they鈥檝e found the culprits.