Noise in the Workplace: Proposal for Decreasing Noise Pollution

The noise pollution and its effects have been underestimated in the recent past because they have been considered as a local disturbing factor only concentrated in restricted fields and in particular areas of work. Nonetheless, today the noise appears as one of the major causes of life quality decrease. The aim of this article is to define and analyze this issue from a privileged point of view, considering the consequences of the noise pollution both within a working environment both within the urban environment in which is located a production system. In detail, this paper presents the results obtained from the analysis of a company operating in the field of environmental protection and that performs different activities of screening, sorting and recycling of waste produced in the urban context. For this company the authors have studied the operating conditions in which the workers perform their work activities, established the most adapted methodologies and tools indispensable to carry out the noise measurements and evaluated the existence of hazardous conditions. They present in the last part of the work different operational and structural solutions capable of contain the risk for the health of the workers and significantly reduce the noise emissions in the environment