Over 10% of industrial workers report hearing damage or hearing loss every year, which can lead to further complications and cause concerns for your business. Protection from excessive noise is essential to any workplace, but especially to those in the industrial sector.
Reducing sound pollution is crucial for the safety of your workers, so it is important to know how to accomplish just that. This article will discuss noise management solutions for your facility, whether it be factory work or warehousing. It will highlight different sound reduction materials and noise control strategies for a variety of workplaces.
What Is Noise Management?
To begin our discussion of factory and warehouse noise reduction, it is important to first understand what noise management is and how it can be so beneficial for your industrial workplace.
Noise management is the act of handling and minimizing noise pollution in the workplace. Noise pollution occurs when sound levels are extremely high, which can cause a variety of health and safety hazards for your workers and your industry. Excessive occupational noise exposure can lead to temporary or even permanent hearing damage, hearing loss, distraction, low productivity, and more frequent breaks. In order to take care of your workers and keep your productivity levels high, factory noise reduction is important.
Noise management can come in a variety of forms, such as noise awareness training for your employees, proper PPE (personal protective equipment), and additional noise reduction materials that you can put up throughout your facility to reduce sound levels. This article will focus primarily on these types of sound reduction, and we’ll delve deeper into these strategies shortly.
Sound Reduction Materials
Among the many noise management solutions available, one comes in the form of soundproofing your space. Soundproofing can be as simple as small acoustic foams or as large as acoustic paneling or industrial curtains. Here are just some of the materials that can be found in sound dampening products – we will highlight these materials and then refer to them in specific noise reduction strategies.
- Fiberglass – Fiberglass panels are excellent for both industrial and residential soundproofing. They help reduce sound levels and improve acoustics.
- Acoustic Foam – Foam is a great tool to reduce sound pollution. This smaller, lightweight sound reduction equipment helps absorb and dampen sound in a room.
- Industrial Fabrics – Acoustic fabrics are woven to be incredibly thick and strong, making them durable and useful for sound dampening. These fabrics come in different forms, such as blankets or curtains.
- Soundproofing Paint – This is an excellent supplementary soundproofing material; a thick layer of paint on your walls and ceilings will help reduce sound levels in any room.
- Acoustic Sealants – Similarly, sealants can help prevent sound from spreading outside of a certain area and keep a room more quiet and private.
Warehouse Noise Reduction Strategies
If you are looking for noise management solutions for warehouse spaces, there are many different options that you can utilize. Depending on what work you are doing in your warehouse space, your business may be completing many separate tasks at once or could need separate spaces for private work.
Creating enclosures is an excellent way to reduce noise in your warehouse. An enclosure can be created with a variety of materials, such as industrial curtains or acoustic panels and screens. You can use these sound dampening materials as walls and create a small room or series of barriers to block noise out of a designated area.
These enclosures can be immensely helpful when your warehouse has a fully open floor plan; you can create enclosures that can be used for break rooms and private meeting areas, as well as separating different work zones from each other.
Factory Noise Reduction Strategies
When you are in a factory setting, sound reduction materials can be utilized in various ways to absorb sound and protect your workers. Different strategies are better suited for facilities with a lot of heavy machinery.
Industrial curtains and acoustic screens and panels are still an excellent means of reducing noise, but instead of using them to create enclosures, you can simply line the walls with these materials. This will help prevent noise from bouncing and reflecting back through the space, creating higher decibel levels.
You can also use soundproofing materials like blankets or acoustic foams to quiet some of your loudest machinery. Securely draping acoustic blankets over your loud equipment can help dampen the sound and reduce the emitted decibels. These sound dampening tools can help significantly reduce harm in your workplace.
Additional Solutions for Noise Management
Beyond enclosures, industrial curtains, and acoustic blankets, there are plenty of other noise management solutions that you can use for factory and warehouse noise reduction. Here are just a few additional strategies that you can use to reduce sound levels:
- Ceiling Baffles: Ceiling baffles are sound reducing tools that hang from the ceiling of your facility. They are great supplemental tools when you already have industrial curtains or acoustic panels.
- Acoustic Foams: Foams are a lightweight and inexpensive form of noise reduction. These tools are great for use in offices or private rooms where you need clean acoustics and want to prevent noise from spreading to other rooms or areas.
- PPE: Personal protective equipment is essential to any workplace. When it comes to preventing harm from noise, make sure your workers are outfitted with earplugs or ear protection whenever they are on the floor.
- Strategic Sound Usage: Depending on your machinery, you can stagger the use of your loud equipment so things are not running all at the same time. This can reduce noise levels, though PPE is still important.
Noise Management with Singer Safety
At Singer Safety, we can offer you the noise management solutions you need for your company. Whether you are looking for acoustic foams or industrial curtains for factory noise reduction, our team of experts can match you with the perfect equipment for your business.
Contact our team at Singer Safety today for the best in noise management.
