Andrew Purvis
Director, Sustainable Manufacturing, worldsteel
3 March 2026
A personal question that reveals a deeper truth
Hearing loss is one of the most common — and least visible — occupational injuries in heavy industry. On World Hearing Day 2026, we need to confront why it still happens and why prevention matters.
My father-in-law, a University of London lecturer, author, wit and born communicator, experienced hearing loss at a relatively young age and was forced to retire early. Once, he asked me a question that stopped me dead: “Would you rather be blind or deaf?”
I answered “deaf”, instinctively. He replied, “I’d rather be blind. If you’re blind, people help you. If you’re deaf, people treat you like an idiot.”
He wasn’t making a judgment about disability, and obviously, both are difficult conditions to live with, but he was describing his lived experience. Hearing loss, he said, doesn’t just reduce sound; it breaks communication, strains relationships, and quietly erodes dignity. I’ve never forgotten that, because it captures something we often underestimate: how essential hearing is to human connection.
A preventable injury we still tolerate
His hearing loss was genetic and unavoidable. Occupational hearing loss is different. It is preventable — yet it remains widespread in noise-intensive industries like ours.
It is estimated that 430 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss, and on average, about 16% of adult-onset hearing loss is due to occupational exposure.[1]
Noise-induced hearing loss is permanent. Technology can help manage its effects, but it cannot restore natural hearing — and everyday communication, especially with family and friends, often becomes significantly harder.
Noise harms more than hearing
The damage goes further – prolonged exposure to noise levels over 85 decibels (dB) not only impairs hearing but also increases the risk of elevated stress levels, high blood pressure, and increased workplace accidents. Studies have shown that workers exposed to high noise levels are more likely to develop hypertension.
This is not a new or marginal problem. We don’t have exact prevalence figures from the Industrial Revolution — but early occupational physicians described hearing loss in noisy trades like metalworking as common and irreversible. This shows how pervasive the problem was and remains – a 2019 study found that 80% of steelworkers had hearing loss at noise-sensitive frequencies[2],especially those working in the loudest areas of the plant.
Sounds can be harmful when they are too loud, even for a brief time, or when they are both loud and long-lasting. These sounds can damage sensitive structures, tiny hairs, in the inner ear and cause noise-induced hearing loss. Most occupational hearing loss doesn’t come from dramatic single events – it comes from everyday noise, day after day, until damage is already done.
Fundamentally, the issue is energy — energy damaging sensitive body parts. In many ways, hearing loss is an invisible, and crucially unfelt injury. If hearing damage hurt immediately, far fewer people would suffer noise-induced hearing loss — but it doesn’t, and that is what makes it so dangerous.
Why PPE alone does not solve the problem
If hearing protection exists, why is hearing loss still so widespread?
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is an essential part of the toolbox for protecting workers, and in many settings it provides effective, practical protection when correctly selected, fitted, and used.
However, small lapses in PPE use lead to disproportionately large losses of protection. Wearing hearing protection can reduce noise exposure to safe levels, but if not worn the entire duration of exposure, even for a short time, overexposure may occur. For PPE to be effective as the main control, it needs to be used correctly, all of the time.
PPE, when relied on as the main control, fails at scale, not because people are careless, but because it assumes perfect, uninterrupted human behaviour in imperfect, pressured work. This reflects a core insight from human- and organisational-performance (HOP) thinking.
Treat noise like any other serious hazard
Noise risk reduction that relies mainly on PPE is really saying: “We accept the noise. We just hope people manage it perfectly.”
The hierarchy says something very different: “Treat noise like any other serious hazard — eliminate it where you can, engineer it down where you can’t, and only then rely on people and PPE.”
Ensuring that protection is realised in practice requires training, discipline, and—above all—leaders who lead by example and do not look the other way.
When PPE is not worn consistently or correctly, leaders should respond with curiosity rather than enforcement alone: understanding why it is not working, whether the task or design can be changed, and whether better, more usable PPE (for example, with built-in communication features) is needed.
Applying the hierarchy of control to noise
So as a serious and genuine hazard, noise should be treated like any other occupational safety risk – through relentless and disciplined application of risk management and the hierarchy of control.
The real cost of inaction
All of this sounds expensive, but the costs of inaction can be more. For employers, the cost of hearing loss is rarely confined to healthcare or compensation. It shows up in lost productivity, communication failures, increased error and accident risk, and the early loss of skilled, experienced workers.
Across industrial sectors, untreated hearing loss is consistently associated with reduced performance and earlier exit from the workforce, creating costs that accumulate quietly. In noise-intensive industries, these indirect business costs can far outweigh the investment required to prevent hearing damage in the first place.
From awareness to action
Noise causes permanent injury. It is invisible, usually unfelt, and irreversible – which is precisely why it is so dangerous. This is not a marginal or historic problem. It is widespread, current, and we are not managing it as well as we think we are.
On World Hearing Day, the challenge is not just awareness, but action – to treat noise like any other serious occupational hazard, and to address it first through design, engineering, and leadership, not just protection and management after the fact.
Hearing protects connection, dignity and safety — at work and beyond it.