IRA update: Federal government works to decarbonize construction materials

From glass and concrete for buildings to vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service, the federal government buys a lot of stuff-about $630 billion worth every year. With that purchasing power comes influence, which the Biden administration is increasingly wielding to push markets toward more sustainable materials, particularly in the construction and transportation sectors.

The most recent move came in March, when the administration announced $6 billion for 33 projects across more than 20 states to decarbonize energy-intensive manufacturing industries making products like steel, chemicals, concrete and even food. That announcement-using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL)-came as other agencies pursue a series of policy tools and funding opportunities to drive embodied carbon out of the highest-emitting sectors, particularly buildings.

"Spurring on the next generation of decarbonization technologies in key industries like steel, paper, concrete, and glass will keep America the most competitive nation on Earth," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm in the announcement. "These investments will slash emissions from these difficult-to-decarbonize sectors and ensure American businesses and American workers remain at the forefront of the global economy."

Embodied carbon refers to the emissions generated by the full life cycle of the construction process, including extracting, manufacturing and shipping materials, as well as the construction process and waste disposal. It is increasingly recognized as a major component of the building sector's carbon footprint, particularly for new construction. Overall, it is estimated to account for about 10% of the building sector's full life cycle emissions, but studies have found it can account for more than 50% of a new building's full life cycle emissions.

The IRA-and to a lesser extent, the BIL-are tackling that impact in variety of ways. Recognizing that more data and analysis is needed to accurately create apples-to-apples analysis of materials, Congress included in the IRA $100 million in funding for the U.S. EPA to create a new program for identifying and labeling construction materials with low embodied carbon, and another $250 million to create a program of grants and technical assistance aimed at improving the standardization, measurement, reporting and verification of embodied carbon.

That work is well under way. Last year, the EPA issued preliminary determinations on "substantially lower" embodied carbon levels for four priority materials believed to have the most impact: cement/concrete, glass, asphalt and steel. More recently, the EPA released a draft approach for the labeling program together with proposed criteria to support data quality improvement.

Cement/concrete, glass, asphalt and steel are the four priority materials for the EPA to decarbonize. Photo credit: Jorge Lopez.

That has allowed other agencies to proceed with additional work funded through the IRA.

In December 2023, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced nearly $2 billion in IRA investments for 150 federal building improvement projects in 39 states across the country, specifically for the procurement of low-embodied-carbon products across those four most impactful categories, which account for nearly half of all U.S. manufacturing greenhouse gas emissions and about 98% of the construction materials that the federal government buys for infrastructure projects.

The idea is to kick-start the shift to more sustainable versions of those products as the EPA conducts more research and to send a strong signal to contractors that reducing embodied carbon will be a strong priority in federal contracting moving forward. The U.S. Department of Transportation is similarly deploying $2 billion in IRA funding for low-embodied-carbon infrastructure materials like concrete and steel.

The White House has also been focused on incorporating embodied carbon measurement into its proposed national definition for a building with zero emissions, which in its first phase covers only operational emissions. USGBC was honored to participate in a White House roundtable in March around this effort and the EPA work, and we have submitted comments about both the definition and the labeling program.

All of the new programs are on top of the administration's ongoing Buy Clean Initiative that prioritizes procurement of sustainable materials across the federal government's purchasing programs, from carpet to drywall to furniture. In fact, the administration recently finalized a new Sustainable Products and Services rule modernizing purchasing standards and directing federal agencies to prioritize procurement of American-made and sustainable goods.

There is still much work to be done, but the recent federal activity is a major step forward for both the methods of measuring embodied carbon and for accelerating the market transition through scaled procurement. It's enough to make you wonder if we may look back on the mid-2020s as the time we turned the corner on making low-embodied-carbon materials a reality.