Is Environmental Noise The New Passive Smoking?

Most of us have lived through a paradigm shift in societal attitudes to passive smoking. Here, KP Acoustics Research Labs, part of the wider KP Acoustics Group analyse the risks of environmental noise exposure and offer that a similar shift in perceptions of environmental noise is needed to combat these risks effectively. The construction industry must play a key role in sustainable building design and execution to limit the impact of environmental noise on our society.

Key findings:

• Research by the World Health Organization finds that an estimated 1 million healthy life years were lost from traffic-related environmental noise in western Europe in a single year.


The last European Quality of Life survey, conducted in 2016-17, also revealed that 32% of more than 30,000 survey participants reported problems with noise in the immediate neighbourhood of their homes.

Professor Chris Barlow, Head of Research and Development at KP Acoustics Research Labs comments: "Our position in relation to environmental noise arguably resembles that which we faced with passive smoking in the 1990s. There is a scientific consensus about the risks, but this is yet to fully translate into a wider attitudinal transformation among the general population. If the construction industry could grasp the scale of the risk, that would be a massive step in the right direction, as better building design would make an enormous difference in mitigating the effects of noise exposure.

"We now see passive smoking not as a necessary part of everyday life but as an unnecessary and unsustainable risk to our health that can be easily avoided. If we are to reach a similar position for environmental noise exposure, the construction industry will play a vital role in helping us get there."