Norway Has Figured Out How to Make Construction Much Quieter

As a resident of a neighborhood where there’s been a lot of new construction in the last 10 to 15 years, I can say with some certainty that that process comes with some side effects — not the least of which is the sound that comes from construction crews assembling buildings of all shapes and sizes. Those two would seem to go hand in hand — though news on the ground in at least one country suggests that there’s an alternative.

Writing at The Guardian, Ajit Niranjan filed a report from Oslo, a city where new construction is an everyday sight. Unlike other cities where this is the case, however, that new construction doesn’t always come with deafening industrial noise. Why? Well, just as Norway’s new car sales have trended heavily electric in recent years, so too has its construction industry.

Niranjan reports that two-thirds of projects overseen by Oslo’s Agency for Urban Environment in 2024 had machine hours powered by electricity. The agency in question viewed this as an opportunity to serve as a kind of proof of concept for emerging technology.

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“We’ve used a lot of demo editions and customised machines, so the technology is developing and becoming more suitable for these kinds of projects,” Ingrid Kiær Salmi, an engineer at the Agency for Urban Environment, told The Guardian.

Reducing both noise pollution and atmospheric pollution is a worthy goal for obvious reasons. For now, the big question is whether Oslo’s local actions can inspire other entities to do the same — and whether that can have a significant effect on the industry as a whole.