Landsborough meat renderer Norganic Proteins hit with enforcement order over ‘strongly offensive’ odour
After years of searching, Dave Szabo thought he had found his dream home in the idyllic Sunshine Coast town of Landsborough at the foot of the Glasshouse Mountains.
Then, two days after moving in, he smelled it.
“It smells like boiling meat. It’s really strong, sometimes a mixture of burnt hair, sometimes almost like septic,” he said.
His family lived around the corner from a factory that processed unwanted meat and byproducts (a process that separates fats and moisture from proteins) for products such as dog food.
Szabo said he talked to some people in the area before buying the house, but most didn’t care about the smell.
“We had heard some rumors and reached out to some people, and they assured us that the situation was not as bad as people thought,” he said.
Living with him was a completely different story. Szabo said the family canceled plans for a backyard pool after moving in last December and spent almost $8,000 on air conditioning for the days they couldn’t keep the windows open.
“Children are overwhelmed by summer heat waves,” he said.
Szabo, who works from home as a cybersecurity expert, said there were days when even drying laundry was exposed to the smell.
The odor resulted in the environmental department issuing an Environmental Enforcement Order to a company called Norganic Proteins.
This is not the first time the company owned by businessman Kent Quinn has been warned.
Norganic, which has been operating in the area since 2018, was granted a protection order in 2022, and the department noted that records of the odor date back only months after the business was taken over.
In the new executive order issued March 12, the department said officers visited areas surrounding the facility multiple times in late 2025 and early 2026 after a series of complaints began in November.
Compliance officer Ben Grant said of the visit in February: “The odor was consistently experienced by officers and was described as an extremely offensive and intense odor.”
The maximum penalty if Norganic fails to comply with the order is five years in prison or a $276,000 fine.
Norganic announced the scent to the public. In November 2025, the company apologized in a local Facebook group, asking residents to catalog and write about their experiences.
“We are truly sorry for the distress and inconvenience the recent odors have caused you and your family. We fully understand how bothersome this is, especially on warm evenings when you want to open your windows and enjoy the fresh air,” the post said.
Norganic has installed new filtration systems and adjusted its processes to reduce problems, the post said.
But Szabo said the odors persisted and argued that Landsborough was a changing place and was no longer suitable to host a meat processing plant.
Although signs of the town’s logging and farming past still exist, gentrification is entrenched.
There is no house worth less than a million dollars in the window of a real estate agent in the town, and the railway station car park is full of vehicles of passengers bound for Brisbane.
“Unfortunately, a facility like this has to be miles away from residences,” Szabo said, adding that his problem was not with Norganic’s type of business, but only with the bad smell it created.
“I don’t want them to close, I just want them to stop the smell,” he said.
Contacted through Norganic, Quinn did not respond by deadline.
Start your day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.
