Advocates sue EPA to enforce noise law: Shots

Last June, an anti-noise organization, Quiet Communities, sued the Environmental Protection Agency not doing his job to limit the loud noises people are exposed to in everyday life. The group is now waiting to see if they can argue their case in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

If the judge ultimately rules in the group's favor, the EPA will have to do what Congress told it to do more than half a century ago when it passed the law. Noise Pollution Act: protect public health and the environment against harmful noise pollution.

The federal effort to control noise got off to a good start. After the noise legislation was passed in 1972, the EPA created the Office of Noise Abatement and Control, which quickly set to work studying noise and issuing regulations, including one to limit garbage truck noise, which was later withdrawn. It was already known that extremely loud noise caused hearing damage and even deafness; studies showing harmful effects like heart disease and learning disabilities were just starting to pile up.

The office was on course to consider using jackhammers, lawn mowers, air conditioners, bulldozers, vacuum cleaners and chain saws, with an eye toward setting noise limits. A key part of the program was public education. “We could have prevented a lot of damage,” said Charles Elkins, who headed the office from 1975 to 1981.

These days, if you live within earshot of a highway, if your child's school is next to the railroad tracks, or if your neighbor out there wields a gas-powered leaf blower, you're usually out of luck. Ronald Reagan's administration began the process of defunding Elkins' office in 1981, saying local communities, rather than the federal government, could regulate environmental noise. (Elkins described this reasoning as “bogus.”) The office remains unfunded to this day.

In 2022, a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers went into effect in Washington, D.C., where Elkins now lives. It took Elkins and others six years to get on the books. At the national level, a federal agency like the one he once led could have studied the harms of leaf blowers, identified alternatives, sponsored the development of quieter electric blowers and phased in the regulations. One of Elkins’ biggest laments today, he said, is how little the public understands. noisewhat it does to us and what we can do to reduce harmful exposure.

Decibel levels and exposure times for the amount of sound that causes physical damage to the ears are known. Several researchers studying the health effects of chronic exposure to lower noise levels have told me that it is difficult to find funding for their work.

However, some impressive findings have been made. In a recently published review, European researchers write concluded that noise from transportation increases the risk of ischemic heart disease, heart failure and stroke. Such noise is also known to increase levels of stress hormones, disrupt sleep and strain blood vessels, which the team said could explain their findings. Other studies have linked noise to an increased risk of diabetes diabetes.

The increases are small. Although the exact number varies between studies, for example, traffic noise increases the risk of death from coronary heart disease by about 5% for every 10 A-weighted decibel (dBA) increase in traffic noise exposure. dBA level is a measure of the pressure exerted by a sound, adjusted to take into account the sensitivity of the human ear to different frequencies. A difference of 10 dBA is the difference between the sound level of a normal conversation and the sound level in a noisy room.)

But because the incidence of cardiovascular death is so high, a 5% increase represents a lot of people. A number from the World Health Organisation gives an idea of ​​the extent of the damage: traffic noise in Western Europe causes the loss of 1.6 million healthy life years each year.

In terms of scale, 20 dBA is a whisper in a quiet room, 85 dBA is louder than a typical alarm clock and quieter than a typical lawn mower, and 110 dBA is the sound of a rock concert or a jackhammer. The last time the EPA proposed noise limits was in 1974, before the health effects were widely known. Those limits were an average of 70 dB (unweighted decibels) over 24 hours to prevent hearing damage, and 55 dB outdoors/45 dB indoors over 24 hours for general comfort.

In 2015, Richard Neitzelprofessor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues estimated that a 5 dB noise reduction would reduce the incidence of high blood pressure by 1.4 percent and coronary heart disease by 1.8 percent in the U.S., resulting in an estimated $3.9 billion in annual economic benefits. But Neitzel pointed out a significant reduction in the study:He had to rely on data from 1981, the last time the EPA had estimated noise exposure.

Neitzel and several other noise researchers I spoke with complain about another information gap: Not only is there little knowledge about noise pollution in the U.S., it is particularly pronounced when it comes to its impact on low-income and disadvantaged groups. But they were all certain that noise disproportionately affects these groups.

Planners routed highways through it neighborhoods with few resources For decades, and historically, poor people have been more likely to live near… Train tracksFactories, which are often noisy, are more likely to be located in or near low-income neighborhoods than in high-income neighborhoods. In addition, low-income housing may do little to block outside noise. And the money needed to pass noise ordinances may be prohibitive for many poorer communities.

Major environmental organizations have not stepped in to do research or push policies as they have for air and water pollution. The reason, suspects Denis Hayes, legendary environmentalist and organizer of Earth Day, is money. People who are inclined to donate to environmental organizations expect them to save the whales or clean up the air, not to fight highway noise.

“When viewed nationally, noise simply does not compete with other environmental problems in terms of emotional intensity,” Hayes wrote in an email. If potential donors are themselves affected by noise pollution, they are likely at most to support local efforts to reduce it.

I’m lucky because my husband and I were recently able to move from Seattle to a quiet island ten miles away. Yes, I occasionally hear a gas-powered leaf blower, a plane flying low overhead, the loud fans cooling the greenhouses on the organic farm next door, or someone on a motorcycle with no muffler. But those sounds are rare, and merely a reminder of how lucky I am.

This story was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Joanne Silberner writes about global health, mental health, medical research, and climate change for NPR, The New York Times, STAT, Undark, and Global Health Now, among others.