Whether your goal is to identify, control or mitigate noise in an industrial environment, the installation of a noise monitoring system can be an important step in accomplishing those goals. In fact, you can decrease the risk of violating environmental restrictions, maintain OSHA compliance, and meet community standards and regulations with the empirical data provided by a noise monitoring system.
Protecting Your Work Force
As a business owner, it’s important to understand the specific noise regulations your particular community may have, but also to understand how such noise may impact your business or workforce. Noise can result in temporary or permanent hearing loss, create physical and psychological stress, reduce productivity, interfere with communication and concentration, and contribute to workplace accidents and injuries by making it difficult to hear instructions, warning signals or alarms.
Protecting Your Bottom Line
Beyond the human cost of excessive noise in the workplace, however, there are also the financial implications to consider. According to OSHA, ‘Twenty-two million workers are exposed to potentially damaging noise at work each year. Last year, U.S. businesses paid more than $1.5 million in penalties for not protecting workers from noise. While it's impossible to quantify the human toll of hearing loss, an estimated $242 million is spent annually on workers' compensation for hearing loss disability.’
Additionally, there is a direct correlation between the value of a business and how much risk is associated with that business. Lower risk means a higher valuation. Eliminating noise means lowering risk for your business which equates to your business being worth more!
How A Noise Monitoring System Can Help
Noise monitoring systems not only accurately measure sound levels on a continual basis, but also identify, record and store one time or out of the ordinary noise events. The recordings make statistical analysis possible and from that analysis, solutions for noise mitigation can be developed. Noise monitoring systems are used in dozens of locations and applications (not just at industrial facilities), including but not limited to:
- Airports
- Heavy Rail or Auto Traffic Routes
- Construction Sites
- Drilling and Fracking Locations
- Mining Operations
- Motorsport Venues
- Sport Stadiums
- Wind Farms
- Residential communities
A noise monitoring system pays for itself by delivering two important benefits time after time in location after location:
Increased Efficiency, Productivity and Worker Safety
A noise monitoring system can efficiently monitor noise and vibration levels critical for planning, maintaining and growing your operations. With a monitoring system, you can reliably measure and analyze noise exposure around the clock, access real-time and historical data online at any time, and automatically get real-time alerts to quickly act and avoid breaching regulatory and/or safety limits.
Compliance
With effective monitoring, you can decrease your risk of violating OSHA restrictions. With a system’s data, you can improve your workplace conditions, provide stakeholders with the ability to align perceptions, set expectations and decrease community complaints. Further, you can easily and proactively report compliance in order to prevent operational delays or incur financial penalties.
At Sonic-Shield, we have professionals who can advise you on the best methods and solutions for you to use to comply with OSHA’s regulations, ensure the safety of your employees and create neighborly goodwill.
Make hearing conservation part of your corporate culture. Get in touch with our acoustical experts to complete the proper testing and get recommendations for the best solutions to keep you compliant.
