3 Sustainability News Updates for Q3 2024

01  Federal Investment: The EPA Pumps Money into Low-Carbon Materials

Over the summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made some key announcements about how it plans to spend close to $250 million to support a transition to low-carbon construction materials in the country. 

The first announcement, in July, listed 38 recipients of a total of nearly $160 million in grants to help businesses assess and report their carbon emissions through Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), thereby making vetted low-emitting new and salvaged options available to architects and builders in 14 product categories. Among the grant awardees are Build Reuse (see “Squaring Circular Design” in METROPOLIS’s Products 2024 issue), which will develop a way to assess and declare emissions through salvaged materials, and the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), which will build on the success of its Declare label to enhance EPD data quality and accessibility.

In August, the EPA announced that it will put $100 million toward a new label program to define what “clean” (i.e., low-emission) construction materials are, and to help federal agencies and other buyers use those materials in their projects. The label program will prioritize steel, glass, asphalt, and concrete, and every product that earns the label will be listed in a publicly accessible central registry.

Both these initiatives are focused on American-made materials in keeping with the larger goals of the Inflation Reduction Act, from which these funds are derived.

02 Social Equity: The Just 3.0 Label Launches

At the time of writing, 188 organizations around the world had the ILFI Just 2.0 label, one of the most popular ways for companies in the building industry to demonstrate their commitment to and achievements in social equity and justice. The label is especially valuable to architecture firms—103 practices in the United States alone have invested in Just.

This May, at the Living Future Conference, ILFI announced the release of Just 3.0, the next version of the label, which incorporates program updates and offers refinements to some existing indicators. It also includes three new indicators:

01 Recruitment, which measures the diversification of the workforce along an expansive list of criteria including not just race, ethnicity, or gender but also socioeconomic background, parental/caregiver status, and many more.

02 Accessibility asks organizations to address both physical and digital access as well as workplace culture, policies, training, and regular assessment of practices and systems.

03 Racial + Ethnic Pay Equity aims to reduce disparities in pay, expanding Just 2.0’s requirements around gender-based pay equity.

03 Gathering Steam: Other Recent Developments in Sustainable Design

Here are some other recent developments in policy, certification, and movement building in the United States:

HEAT STRESS 
The U.S. Department of Labor released a proposed rule in July requiring employers to protect their workers from the effects of extreme heat. If it goes into effect, it will apply to about 35 million Americans working both indoors and outdoors.

A NATIONAL PLAN 
In April, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy released the first-ever federal plan for decarbonizing the building industry. Titled Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector, the document is remarkable not only for its consideration of embodied carbon emissions but also for the connections it builds between decarbonization and equity, affordability, and resilience.

HEALTHY BUILDING POLICY 
The International WELL Building Institute plans to host the first Healthy Building Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., in September, bringing together policymakers, government officials, industry leaders, and public health experts to examine policy that affects the built environment and thereby influences human health and well-being.

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• News

• Avinash Rajagopal
• Construction Materials
• Embodied Carbon
• Equity and Access