Sustainability News Updates for Q4 2024

“Alignment” is the word of the hour in every sector of the building industry, as different stakeholders come together to tackle climate impacts.

“Clean” Construction

EPA announces its material label program

The federal government is one of the biggest buyers of building materials in the United States—federally funded purchases account for more than half of all concrete poured in the country per year, for example. So the EPA has made an even deeper foray into the development and promotion of sustainable building materials by announcing this past August that it will develop a new label program to help “federal purchasers and other buyers find and buy cleaner, more climate-friendly construction materials and products.” 

The program will define what constitutes “clean” construction materials, then keep those requirements updated every two to four years in order to drive the market toward preferring low-carbon materials. The EPA will focus on steel, glass, asphalt, and concrete as its first priorities, and has already issued supporting documents for the label program, including Product Category Rule criteria—which are the rules by which manufacturers will assess and report their impact using Environmental Product Declarations.

 2 to 4 Years
“Clean” requirements for construction materials will be periodically updated by the EPA.

Embodied Carbon Alignment 

The ECHO Project gets everyone on the same page

When the first generation of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools for buildings were developed—the Athena Environmental Impact Estimator in 2002 and Tally in 2013 among them—we had but a nascent understanding of embodied carbon. So as the field of carbon accounting in buildings has grown and deepened over the past decade, we’ve ended up with different projects around the United States reporting different stages of their life cycle, using different methodologies for calculations, and even using different terminology in their assessment. The result? It’s been very hard to compare buildings, benchmark embodied carbon emissions, or set targets for reducing those emissions.

In 2023, five nonprofits—Architecture 2030, Building Transparency, the Carbon Leadership Forum, the International Living Future Institute, and the U.S. Green Building Council—came together to align on how we collect and report embodied carbon data. Known as the ECHO project, which stands for Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization, the group now includes representatives from a host of other associations and organizations in the built environment.

This fall, ECHO published its first industry recommendations. The ECHO Reporting Schema, released this past September, provides a common format for reporting project-level LCA results—harmonizing different methods of reporting data and filling in gaps in current methodologies. The second publication in October, “Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements: ECHO Recommendations for Alignment,” assesses 29 different commitments, certification programs, standards, policies, and benchmarking initiatives relevant to North American project LCA requirements, to finally provide a single, aligned set of LCA requirements.

New Fronts

Landscape Architecture; Climate-Friendly Construction

01 New Guides for Landscape Architects: The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has released a new set of free guides to help architects, specifiers, and industry partners work toward ASLA’s Climate Action Plan goal of zero-emission landscape architecture by 2040. The resources include guides to decarbonizing specifications and the design process, as well as help navigating environmental product data.asla.org/climateactionplan.aspx

02 Climate Change Playbook for Construction: Architects complaining about risk-averse contractors who cannot get on board with a project’s decarbonization goals now have an insider tool to help get the job done. Written by contractors for contractors, the AGC Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in the Construction Industry is the first resource to help construction firms “play a leading role in crafting carbon-reduction measures for the industry.”agc.org/climate-change-playbook

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