New European Directive on environmental noise

The Official Journal of the European Union has published EU Commission Directive 2020/367 of 4 March 2020 amending Annex III of the Directive 2002/49/EC regarding to the establishment of evaluation methods for the harmful effects of environmental noise.

At the time this Directive was adopted, the relevant information and statistical data that could be used were the Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region of the World Health Organization (WHO), which presented dose-effect relationships for the harmful effects caused by exposure to environmental noise.   

Now Directive 2002/49/EC has been amended with the planned measures drawn up by the committee, which has been created for this purpose, replacing Annex III on methods of evaluation of the harmful effects of noise with information on all the effects, calculation and evaluation.

Population exposure will be assessed independently for each noise source and harmful effect. When the same people are simultaneously exposed to different noise sources, the harmful effects generally cannot accumulate. However, these effects can be compared in order to evaluate the relative importance of each noise.

Member states will put into force the legal, regulatory and administrative provisions necessary to comply with the provisions of this Directive no later than December 31, 2021.

Working more safely

At Fraternidad-Muprespa we are convinced that training and awareness are fundamental pillars to avoid occupational risks. We believe that all accidents are preventable and an essential tool to achieve this is training.

For this reason, we encourage you to learn about our proposal to carry out an online training on the prevention of accidents and occupational diseases that we call Prevention Classroom. It is a free and open access platform for our associated companies in which we have e-learning courses and audiovisual workshops for all sectors and activities.