Noise pollution

Noise pollution

I want to add my (quiet) voice to those few, Indonesians and foreigners, who from time to time raise the issue of noise pollution. Given the great many serious ills which beset the country, and the world, this issue may strike some as relatively minor.

Air and water pollution, not to mention degradation of the land and the living sources that stand on it -- and the as yet inadequate efforts to deal with this -- is far more frequently discussed.

Noise pollution, on the other hand, perhaps because of its evanescence, attracts less attention, though we are all hit with it everyday. Regulations, however ineffective, concerning noise pollution do exist, and properly conducted environmental impact assessments and audits attend to this question.

While there are doubtless individual, and cultural, differences in levels of tolerance of noise pollution, it is my impression that this issue bothers Indonesians and foreigners to equal degrees.

The list of noise pollution sources is so long, and so familiar to us, that it would be pointless to lay it out here.

Let us consider just one source, which on first appearances might seem trivial: the insidious, mind-numbing electronically- produced "jingle" that announces, from very far off, the impending approach of the Wall's Ice Cream vendor on his tricycle cart.

Being subjected to this once a day might be "tolerable" but in my average (nonelite) housing complex, Wall's Ice Cream vendors criss-cross the area from morning till evening, making repeated runs, and repeated and prolonged assaults on the peacefulness of the neighborhood.

By itself, the Wall's Ice Cream jingle might not be so bad, were it not only one strand of a constant stream of other such street-side noises produced by a wide variety of peddlers.

Fortunately, most of these ( I have counted at least 35 different types of itinerant sellers in my neighborhood) have relatively benign (and even occasionally pleasant) call-signs -- such as the familiar tok-tok-tok of the mie seller.

Others, however, such as the obnoxious truck with the loudspeaker calling ro-roti, ro-roti or gas-gas-gas, or the sate sellers near my last house who used car horns run from storage cells to announce their arrival, are not so environmentally friendly.

Now, Wall's methods have generated copycats: the latest innovation in my area is a vendor selling his wares to the tune of Beethoven's Fuer Elise! Again, aside from purely esthetic considerations, it is the constant, repetitive and cumulative assault of these sources which aggravates the problem -- but clearly some sources, including Wall's Ice Cream, are worse than others.

A crucial question: who gives Wall's Ice Cream, and its ilk, the right to inflict noise on citizens (the majority of whom clearly do not stop these carts and buy ice cream)? I would be interested in hearing the answer to this question, be it from city officials, lawyers, environmental health specialists, environmental activists, and not least from the distributor of Wall's Ice Cream itself.

TIM G. BABCOCK

Jakarta