> I ended up caulking the entire apartment with clear caulk and sealing any air gaps. Because the hi-rise was pressurized like most hi-rises, I concluded somehow this was drawing up smells from grease traps etc.
I would be cautious of taking actions like these as it can have some pretty bad knock on effects. I'm on the board of my condo corporation for a high rise in Canada and we have seen topics like this come up from time to time.
To help control odour between units, the air handling system in our building is designed to draw air into the hallways, from the hallways to the units, to outside. The idea of routing airflow like this is to try and prevent smell transfer between units, but the airflow also has a purpose to help control moisture buildup, which IIRC gets worse if there is no airflow, and can lead to mold. So we discourage blocking the airflow from the way the building was designed, and property management has advised us in other buildings this had been observed to lead to severe moisture problems.
And we have had issue pop up with trash smell and the like. Where that's happened to us is two causes, there is a sort of air damper on the garbage chute, and it's gotten jammed on us IIRC. The other is our garbage room opens to take the bins out, and if the doors are left open for an extended period and the wind hits the building right it can draw air through the garbage room and through the chute. This can also occur when folks leave their trash blocking the chute door open allowing more air to flow between the chute and hallways.
Stuff like that can be hard to figure out, because if the garbage room is left open every day, it doesn't always happen due to the wind or possibly other factors.
The third one we get sometimes is smoking smells, which is usually caused by a smoker not wanting to use their balcony in winter, so instead they go into the stairwells. We traced one of those across more than 20 floors once. It can be difficult to trace those ones, so it comes with a lot of sending broadcast messages and work to trace down.
I get not all property managers are super helpful, but if they get a few reports from different individuals and can link it to some action like having the garbage room open can hopefully have them solve the real problem.