A federal court recently ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency ignored its legal duty to regulate noise pollution for more than forty years. At first glance, it feels like another story about a government agency that failed to do what Congress intended.
The more I thought about it, however, the less interested I became in the EPA.
Instead, I found myself thinking about the places we move through every day, the office where concentration is challenging, the restaurant where conversations are hard to engage in, the retail store where music competes with the very people it hopes to attract, and the hospital waiting room where anxiety is amplified instead of eased. None of these environments are meaningfully managed. None belong to any one owner. That struck me as something far more interesting than a regulatory failure. It felt like an opportunity that has remained largely invisible.
Despite living with a profound hearing loss, I have never thought of noise as simply an accessibility issue. It is a profoundly human one. For me, it is the difference between following a conversation and constantly working to keep pace with it. That effort is largely invisible to everyone else, yet it accumulates throughout the day in ways that are difficult to explain.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate that while my hearing loss makes me more aware of speech and noise, it does not make me unique. We have all leaned across a crowded restaurant table, struggled to hear in a reverberant conference room, or left a meeting feeling more mentally exhausted than its agenda should have warranted. Noise affects each of us differently, but it affects all of us.
So when I read the court’s decision, I saw confirmation of something many of us have understood for years. Noise has rarely been treated as a meaningful health issue, or even a meaningful business issue. Instead, it has become something we quietly learn to live around, adapting our behavior rather than asking why the environment itself remains unchanged.
That, to me, is the real lesson buried in this ruling.
Government is not designed to solve a problem quite like noise. Not because of incompetence or indifference, but because of the nature of the problem itself. Noise has no single source, no single owner, and no obvious boundary separating one jurisdiction from another. It slips between agencies, industries, buildings, products, and public spaces. Historically, these are exactly the kinds of challenges regulation struggles to solve, and exactly the kinds of challenges businesses, designers, innovators, and subject matter experts are uniquely positioned to rethink.
The Problem Nobody Owns
The lawsuit itself was remarkably focused.
Quiet Communities, together with former federal prosecutor Jeanne Kempthorne, did not ask the court to invent new regulations or expand the EPA’s authority. They asked the agency to fulfill responsibilities Congress had already assigned decades earlier through the Noise Control Act of 1972 and the Quiet Communities Act of 1978.
The EPA argued that once Congress eliminated funding for its Office of Noise Abatement and Control in 1982, those responsibilities had effectively become dormant. Judge Cobb rejected that reasoning outright. A funding decision may eliminate a program, but it does not erase a legal obligation that Congress never repealed.
It is an important legal distinction, but I think it also reveals something much larger.
None of this happened because anyone decided noise no longer mattered. It happened because, once the office disappeared, so did its institutional champion. There was no longer a budget, no dedicated staff, and no one inside government responsible for keeping noise on the national agenda. As years passed, restarting became increasingly difficult. Expertise disappeared. Priorities shifted. Eventually, noise became something easier to accept than to address.
Looking at it this way, I began to realize that noise isn’t really one problem at all.
Occupational noise has a clear owner. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) establishes exposure limits and requires hearing conservation programs because responsibility rests squarely with employers. That framework has been largely successful precisely because accountability is clearly defined.
The workplace, however, tells a more complicated story. Most offices never approach damaging sound levels, yet many employees spend their days surrounded by chronic, moderate noise that steadily erodes concentration, increases listening effort, and contributes to auditory and cognitive fatigue. It rarely violates a regulation, but it still diminishes the experience of work.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Community noise falls across overlapping jurisdictions. Transportation noise is divided among multiple federal, state, and local agencies. Product noise receives surprisingly little attention despite the number of noisy devices we invite into our homes. Even building acoustics remain driven largely by voluntary standards and private expertise rather than consistent regulation.
The more I examined these categories, the more one pattern kept emerging. Wherever responsibility is clearly defined, progress tends to follow. Wherever ownership becomes diffuse, momentum slows, priorities drift, and the problem quietly becomes everyone else’s.
We’ve seen this before.
We’ve Seen This Before
Once I began thinking about ownership this way, I realized we have seen this pattern before, not in acoustics, but in sustainability.
In 1994, Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, was asked a deceptively simple question by a customer: what was his company doing for the environment? By his own account, he didn’t have a good answer. That question led him to Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce, a book Anderson later described as hitting him “like a spear in the chest.”
What followed wasn’t driven by regulation or public pressure. Interface chose to rethink its business from the inside out, developing its own environmental accounting, launching Mission Zero, and ultimately surpassing goals many considered impossible. Today, the company is working toward becoming carbon negative by 2040.
What has always struck me about that story is not simply Interface’s environmental leadership. It is that a single question from a customer altered the trajectory of an entire company more profoundly than decades of regulation ever could. The opportunity emerged not because government required it, but because someone recognized value where others still saw obligation.
That instinct continues today, even if it is less visible. Political debate may have changed the language around sustainability, but it has not changed the work itself. Many organizations have become quieter about their environmental commitments while continuing to invest behind the scenes. Sustainability has matured beyond a communications strategy. It has become part of how many businesses operate. Once an idea becomes embedded in culture, it no longer depends on headlines to sustain its momentum.
Noise, by comparison, has not yet reached that point. It is still waiting for the business community to recognize it as something more than an operational inconvenience.
A Different Kind of Leadership
Apple arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction.
When Tim Cook recruited Lisa Jackson after her tenure as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, he wasn’t simply hiring someone with regulatory experience. He was bringing environmental expertise inside a company determined to move faster than regulation alone could ever allow. Jackson herself has said that Cook did not hire her to preserve the status quo. He hired her to help shape the future.
The results speak for themselves. Over the past decade, Apple has dramatically reduced its emissions, transformed its supply chain, and established environmental expectations that extend far beyond legal requirements. None of that happened because legislation demanded it. It happened because the company chose to establish a higher standard for itself.
During my years leading accessibility initiatives at Apple Retail, I came to appreciate that same philosophy from a different perspective. The conversations that stayed with me were rarely about meeting a requirement or checking a compliance box. They were about understanding people more completely and recognizing that the best products and experiences emerge when organizations design for the full range of human variability.
Looking back, I realize those conversations shaped how I think about far more than accessibility. They shaped how I think about leadership itself. The more I have reflected on that experience, the more convinced I have become that sound belongs in the same conversation. Differences are not a constraint on innovation. More often than not, they are where innovation begins.
Noise Already Has Its Own Version Of This
Others have quietly been building that future for years.
Quiet Mark, founded by Poppy Szkiler, grew out of a family commitment that stretches back generations. Her grandfather successfully campaigned to have excessive noise recognized as a statutory nuisance in the United Kingdom in 1960. Decades later, Quiet Mark approached the challenge from a different direction, creating an independent certification that helps consumers identify genuinely quieter products and rewarding manufacturers who make sound part of the design process rather than an afterthought.
Arup has approached the issue from yet another perspective. Under the leadership of Raj Patel and its global acoustics practice, the firm has consistently argued that sound should not be viewed simply as a problem to correct after complaints arise. Instead, acoustics should be considered from the very beginning, shaping how people experience workplaces, hospitals, transportation hubs, cultural institutions, and cities.
Although they approached the challenge from different industries and different perspectives, Quiet Mark and Arup arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. Neither waited for government to define what good looked like. Instead, they established their own standards, demonstrating that leadership often begins by recognizing a human need long before it becomes a regulatory requirement.
The Opportunity
That is why I keep returning to this court ruling.
Not because I believe government has no role. It does. But history suggests that entirely new business categories rarely emerge because regulation demands them. They emerge because someone recognizes an overlooked human need and decides to address it before everyone else does.
We have seen this pattern before. Sustainability followed it, evolving from an environmental concern into a strategic business imperative. Accessibility experienced a similar transformation, moving beyond compliance to become a catalyst for innovation, better design, and broader participation.
The more I reflected on the court’s ruling, the more I found myself wondering whether sound may now be approaching a similar inflection point.
We have long understood its relationship to hearing loss. We are now beginning to understand better its influence on concentration, communication, listening effort, cognitive fatigue, employee wellbeing, and customer experience. Yet despite growing awareness, there is still no clear business owner responsible for addressing it comprehensively.
That is precisely why the opportunity exists.
The organizations best positioned to lead may not be regulators at all. They may be hearing technology companies, workplace strategists, architects, retailers, healthcare providers, and employers who already possess the expertise to rethink how people experience sound throughout their day. What remains is someone willing to claim the space.
The Real Lesson
Perhaps that is why this ruling has stayed with me.
At first, I assumed it was another story about four decades of regulatory inaction. The more I reflected on it, however, the more I saw something else. I saw the early signs of a conversation that business has not yet fully embraced.
We have seen moments like this before. Sustainability experienced one. Accessibility experienced one. Neither became transformational because government demanded it. They became transformational because leaders recognized value long before it became conventional wisdom.
Sound may now be approaching that same moment. If it is, then the conversation is no longer about whether noise deserves our attention. The more important question is who will recognize the opportunity first, and who will have the conviction to define the standard before someone else does.
