Making a noise about environmental pollution

By Karen Carstens

Date: 13/11/03

TO MANY, the term "pollution" still conjures up industrial-revolution images of factory pipes spewing sticky substances into rivers or smokestacks belching black clouds into azure skies.

But another, not always self-evident, kind of pollution can be just as damaging to wildlife such as birds or marine mammals and cause long-term health concerns for humans, too.

It's called noise, and most Europeans cannot escape it. At least a third of EU citizens suffer from environmental noise pollution and some ten million more suffer sleep disturbance, according to European Commission estimates.

With the EU executive poised to publish a discussion paper on reducing noise from airports, motorways, railways and industrial sites, several Green MEPs organized a two-day conference in the Parliament focusing on transport-related noise that concludes today (13 November).

The basic idea is to keep up the pressure on both member states and the Commission to come up with solutions to the problem, said Alexander de Roo, one of the deputies behind the event.

The Dutchman said that, in his home country, up to 42% of people suffer from noise pollution. As rapporteur of a 2002 EU noise directive, de Roo tried to push through a sister directive on airport noise, but it didn't fly at the time.

Still, he scored a victory with the noise law, which sets a single standard for member states to measure environmental noise, and requires the Commission to come up with three separate "noise source" directives for tyres, trains and airplanes by 2006.

So far, de Roo claimed, DG Enterprise, which is responsible for tyres, has done precious little due to fierce lobbying from the motor industry, while DG TREN (transport and energy) "has done something for high-speed trains, but not for normal trains".

When it comes to aircraft, de Roo added, the Commission should not bow to the US, where environmental noise may be a less crucial issue than in more densely populated EU member states.

"What we want is for the Commission to make European norms that are better than the weaker international norms," he said.

"This is something that the Commission doesn't like but it's in the directive so they have to do it."

Some Commission officials were not pleased when the noise directive was passed, and were "slamming doors without greeting us", the MEP recalls.

But the issue certainly is not a new one: The Commission in its fifth environmental action programme for 1992-2000 had originally called for a directive harmonizing how member states measure environmental noise by 1994 and for another directive on EU-wide norms a year later.

But then the "subsidiarity principle" was cited, and the noise plans were shelved until the then French environment minister, Dominique Voynet, "brought them back out of the cupboard" in 1999, de Roo said. The noise directive that he subsequently ushered through the Parliament essentially takes "50 different ways of measuring noise" across the EU and narrows this down to one method all must follow, the "LDEN" system, to measure noise in four categories - road, rail, air/airports and plants/factories.

The "L" refers to the standard used, the other letters refer to "day", "evening" and "night", respectively.

In measuring noise levels, the system applies a common-sense mechanism. The day counts as 12 hours, the evening is five, with noise levels graded by a multiple of five, and the night (from 11pm to 7am) is eight hours, multiplied by ten, meaning every daytime noise would be counted ten times.

While the current "night" period at Frankfurt Airport is six hours, the LDEN system does not mean that the airport must shift to an eight-hour night period, explains de Roo.

It does, however, mean that all member states must measure noise using the same system. They must submit reports, including detailed maps reflecting noise concentrations, to the Commission by next year. They must also develop "action plans" by 2007.

But are all these legal requirements just pie-in-the-sky? According to de Roo, in many cases it is not that costly or difficult to harness advanced technologies to make the modes of transport we find indispensable much quieter.

Take tyres: "In Germany, they have developed a tyre that produces half the noise for the same price [as a conventional tyre]."

As for noisy automobile engines, the bane of many a city-dwellers' existence, de Roo claimed the car industry is now arguing that "the big noise comes from the tyres, not the motors". An EU directive on noise from cars is up for a revision in 2006 as well, he added.

Although de Roo would have liked to go even further in his anti-noise crusade, he heralded the 2002 noise directive as "a good start".

At least one third of European Union citizens suffer from environmental noise pollution and some ten million more suffer disturbance, according to European Commission estimates. Article reports on a two-day conference at the European Parliament on 12-13 November 2003, focusing on transport-related noise.