Published on April 17, 2024
Written by Joanne Silberner for Scientific America.
Ten years ago Jamie Banks started working from her home in the town of Lincoln, Mass. After a couple of months, the continuing racket from landscaping machines began to feel unendurable, even when she was inside her home. “This horrible noise was going on for hours every day, every week—leaf blowers, industrial lawnmowers, hedge trimmers,” she says. The sound of a gas-powered leaf blower outside can be as loud as 75 decibels (dB) to someone listening from inside a house—higher than the World Health Organization cutoff to protect hearing over a 24-hour period. “I started thinking, this can’t be good,” she says. “It’s definitely not good for me. It certainly can’t be good for the workers operating the equipment. And there are lots of kids and lots of seniors around. It can’t be good for them either.”
Banks is a health-care specialist and environmental scientist who has worked most of her life as a consultant on health outcomes and behavior change for government agencies, law firms and corporations. She decided to do something about her situation and got together with a like-minded neighbor to pester the town government. It took the pair seven years to get their town to do one thing—ban gas-powered leaf blowers during the summer. The process was long and frustrating, and it made Banks think about going bigger and helping others.
So she did. In June 2023 Quiet Communities, a nonprofit group that Banks founded and runs, sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not publishing or enforcing rules and regulations to limit loud sounds: unmuffled motorcycles, cacophonous factories, the thunder of an airplane just overhead, the roar of an elevated train, the scream of a soundtrack in a spin class, headphones set too loud. There is a federal law that calls for the EPA to do this, but it hasn’t been enforced for more than 40 years.
Banks’s idea that loud noise “can’t be good” is well supported by science. Noise can damage more than just your ears. Through daytime stress and nighttime sleep disturbances, loud sounds can hurt your heart and blood vessels, disrupt your endocrine system, and make it difficult to think and learn. The World Health Organization calculated that in 2018 in the European Union, 1.6 million years of healthy life were lost because of traffic noise. The organization recommended that to avoid these health effects, exposure to road traffic noise should be limited to below a weighted 24-hour average of 53 dB (the sound of a campfire from about 16 feet away) during the day, evening, and night and 45 dB specifically at night (the sound of light traffic about 100 feet away).
Clear, consistent standards for how much is too much, and what works, are unlikely without a revitalization of the EPA’s noise-control office. An agency spokesperson wouldn’t say whether the lawsuit by Quiet Communities will spur any change. The two sides in the suit “are currently in the midst of filing motions and cross-motions,” says Quiet Communities lawyer Sanne Knudsen of the University of Washington. When we spoke, Knudsen expected some kind of agreement would be reached by April and hoped it would be one that got the Office of Noise Abatement and Control up and running again.
In June 2023 Quiet Communities, a nonprofit group that Jamie Banks founded and runs, sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not publishing or enforcing rules and regulations to limit loud sounds. Through daytime stress and nighttime sleep disturbances, loud sounds can hurt your heart and blood vessels, disrupt your endocrine system, and make it difficult to think and learn. Clear, consistent standards for how much is too much, and what works, are unlikely without a revitalization of the EPA’s noise-control office.