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Harms of noise pollution track with U.S. racial inequities

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07 Dec, 2023

This post was originally published on Sustainability Times

Source: Sustainability Times

Pollution has long been shown to have disproportional impacts on minority communities, especially in urban centers, but an innovative review from Colorado State University shows how an oft-overlooked source—noise pollution—affects city neighborhoods that were once “redlined.”

In the United States, redlining describes now-banned discriminatory housing policies that date back nearly a century and once limited access to housing loans and other services. The policies that targeted communities of color then left an imprint that exists today.

“Starting in 1933, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation assigned grades to neighborhoods based on race and wealth,” explains the research team, led by assistant professor Sara Bombaci of the university’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology.

“Grade A neighborhoods were wealthier and whiter, while red lines were drawn around grade D neighborhoods where people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds lived. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, but decades of divestment in these neighborhoods caused enduring disparities.”

Bombaci and a team of acoustic ecologists actually were focused on the urban noise impacts to wildlife, but their work involved looking at how urban noise was distributed across the historical racial divisions that were rooted in the redlining policies of 83 U.S. cities.

Their work, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, found that grade D neighborhoods experience 17% higher maximum noise levels today than grade A neighborhoods do. Further, the grades C and D neighborhoods more often have urban noise levels above the level known to cause human health impacts. Among them are an elevated risk of heart disease and stroke, stress, and hearing loss.

“This is directly linked to structural racism,” Bombaci said. “There’s a clear signal that ties directly to whether these communities were redlined.”

Noise levels stress wildlife, too, and can change reproductive behavior or make certain species more vulnerable to predators. “We need to be thinking more about how these systemic injustices and problems are manifesting to shape ecology and evolution,” said Bombaci, whose study is believed to be the first to examine noise inequity in redlined communities.

She notes that practical use of the information might include adding noise reduction considerations when planning to improve access to parks and green space in these historically marginalized communities. Noise could limit the continued presence or return of wildlife in the urban setting, too.

“If we’re adding green space without mitigating impacts of noise, we might not be fully recognizing the benefits of these green spaces,” she said.

The study paper notes “a growing body of literature documenting the relationships between redlining and the inequitable distribution of environmental harms and goods, green space cover and pollutant exposure.” But another new study from the U.S. city of Los Angeles warns that historically White neighborhoods are starting to lose their historic advantages in an increasingly hot climate.

Wealthy, demographically White neighborhoods still benefit from more trees, less pavement, and cooler temperatures, but the protective effects were only about 58% as strong in 2020 as they were in 1990, according to a study led by botany experts at the University of California – Riverside. The Los Angeles data was published last month in the journal Urban Climate.

There’s no escape from heat and drought, but the UC study makes clear that environmental impacts still reflect inequities. “Hispanic communities faced disproportionate warming when compared to their White counterparts,” the authors conclude.

Fig. 2: Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining grades and noise pollution levels across four US urban areas.

 

The post Harms of noise pollution track with U.S. racial inequities appeared first on Sustainability Times.

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ABB receives EPD status for gearless mill drive ring motor

ABB receives EPD status for gearless mill drive ring motor

ABB has gained Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) status for its Gearless Mill Drive (GMD) ring motor — technology used to drive large grinding mills in the mining industry.

An EPD is a standardised document that provides detailed information about the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle. Based on a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study, the EPD highlights ABB’s commitment to transparency, environmental responsibility and supporting customers in making informed decisions on sustainability in their supply chains.

ABB analysed the environmental impact of a ring motor across its entire life cycle from supply chain and production to usage and end-of-life disposal. The study was conducted for a ring motor of a semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mill with an installed power of 24 MW and was based on a reference service life of 25 years.

“Sustainability is at the core of our purpose at ABB, influencing how we operate and innovate for customers,” said Andrea Quinta, Sustainability Specialist at ABB. “By earning the Environmental Product Declaration for our ring motor, we emphasise our environmental stewardship and industry leadership for this technology. We adhered to the highest standards throughout this process, as we do in the ABB Ring Motor factory every day. This recognition highlights to the mining industry what they are bringing into their own operations when they work with ABB.”

The comprehensive LCA was conducted at ABB’s factory in Bilbao, Spain, and was externally verified and published in accordance with international standards ISO 14025 and ISO 14040/14044. It will remain valid for five years.

The ring motor, a key component of the GMD, is a drive system without any gears where the transmission of the torque between the motor and the mill is done through the magnetic field in the air gap between the motor stator and the motor rotor. It optimises grinding applications in the minerals and mining industries by enabling variable-speed operation, leading to energy and cost savings.

The full EPD for the ABB GMD Ring Motor can be viewed on EPD International.

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