4.	Industrial noise

This term covers all disturbing noises from commercial and industrial noise sources, which are usually related to the operation of installations.

The origin of the provisions and regulations for noise abatement in the industrial and commercial field (fig. 4/1) dates back several decades and then concerned issues of worksite protection and worksite medical services. Deafness used to be a common occupational disease as a consequence of workplace nuisances. Technical rules for the measurement, assessment, prevention and reduction of noise in combination with the accident prevention regulations by professional associations have significantly reduced the risk of coming down with noise-related diseases at one's workplace.

The knowledge of the practical realization of noise abatement in factories gradually gained during industrialization has effects on neighbourhood protection and immission control as well. Besides measures in the context of the licensing of individual projects (immission control), noise abatement must also play a role in the field of spatial planning.

Due to the easily applicable polluter pays principle and clear measurement and assessment regulations for installation-oriented industrial noise, existing noise sources of this kind represent a manageable problem as for remedial measures. If noise abatement is taken into account in the planning of an installation already, the costs are generally low. It often suffices to arrange the buildings (self-shielding effect), delivery possibilities or access and departure roads in a different way.

Subsequent acoustic treatment measures can be very expensive, especially if structural measures (e.g. the improvement of the envelope's sound insulation) are required. When an investor/operator plans an installation, they should look ahead (future expansions, the conversion of the production chain to other machines, the conversion from one-shift to multi-shift operation etc.) and provide for sound technological reserves.

The field of urban land-use planning must also assume the responsibility of preventing the emergence of complaints which would require subsequent redevelopment. But this is only possible if the local conditions are shaped in a way that the operator of an installation meeting the requirement of the best available techniques is able to adhere to the defined immission values towareds a neighbourhood requiring protection.

While the immission prognoses for numerous sound sources (especially for road traffic) are very reliable thanks to established specific emissions, such a projection of noise immissions exists only on the basis of standards or strongly simplifying assumptions as for most of the industrial and commercial installations at the stage of development planning. DIN 18005-1 proves very helpful here (see section 4.2.1).