Biden-Harris administration touts clean construction materials progress

On the one-year anniversary of the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) low embodied carbon (LEC) program, funded by the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the administration has touted the program for catalyzing market demand for LEC materials to boost American innovation, create good-paying jobs and address the climate crisis.

GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan marked the anniversary during a visit to the Carlisle Vitro Architectural Glass plant, a supplier of LEC glass for GSA projects in Kansas City, Missouri, and Richmond, Virgina. The projects are using clean construction materials to upgrade federal buildings.

“Through historic investments like the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is proving that we can buy clean and create good jobs for Americans along the way,” Carnahan said. “Today’s anniversary is a great example of how American manufacturers are ready to meet the need for sustainable building materials and help achieve the triple win: good jobs, solid value for taxpayers and healthier communities.”

One year ago, GSA announced that 11 projects would pilot the procurement and installation of LEC asphalt, concrete, glass and steel, four key energy-intensive construction materials that account for nearly half of U.S. manufacturing greenhouse gas emissions. According to the administration. LEC materials meet crucial project needs while contributing substantially fewer emissions from raw materials and the manufacturing process.  

In November 2023, GSA announced $2 billion in investments for more than 150 construction projects to use these cleaner construction materials across the country. GSA engaged with industry through 16 opportunities, including six industry days to raise awareness of federal Buy Clean requirements and encourage the growth of LEC materials throughout the construction market.

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Since GSA’s pilot launched, manufacturers have published about 17,000 additional Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) in the four material categories, demonstrating that industry is responding to market demand for materials made with lower emissions. EPDs are a key tool for gaining visibility into a product’s environmental impacts through its entire lifetime in a standard, third party-verified format.

According to publicly accessible data, the increase in North American EPDs over the past year includes: more than 14,000 additional EPDs for concrete, a 15 percent increase; 2,700 new asphalt EPDs, quadrupling the number from a year ago; and additional EPDs in most subcategories of steel, including a 60 percent increase in the number of EPDs for structural steel plate and two steel manufacturers’ first EPDs ever.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA’s) complementary grant program to support the development of EPDs Reducing Embodied Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Construction Materials is using funds from the IRA to further strengthen the market for LEC materials. The grant program will support businesses that manufacture construction materials and products to develop and verify EPDs and a new label program will identify low carbon products, in part by standardizing and improving the quality of data used in EPDs. 

“Under President Biden’s leadership to boost American manufacturing and cleaner construction, EPA is working hand-in-hand with GSA as we launch new programs this summer to provide the support manufacturers need to further advance in disclosing and reducing emissions,” EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Deputy Assistant Administrator for Pollution Prevention Jennie Romer says. “By making it easier for federal purchasers to identify more sustainable construction materials, we are transforming the way we build at a national scale and at the same time, improving the health of our communities.”

GSA anticipates that, if it is able to source LEC materials meeting GSA’s most stringent top 20 percent limits for all of its IRA-funded projects, the use of those materials alone will avoid the equivalent of over 40,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, comparable to taking about 10,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year. This embodied carbon emissions reduction estimate is in addition to the 2.3 million tons of operational greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to taking a half-million gas-powered cars off the road for a year.