States Are Pursuing Buy Clean Policies & Programs – CleanTechnica

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If you are a MAGAlomaniac, the federal government has never done one thing right. Not once, not ever! Starting from that premise, it is fairly easy to understand why the current administration is seeking to dismantle every policy of its predecessor, even if it means doing something ignorant like deactivating every EV charger on every federal building in America. Yes, the Mugwump of Mar-A-Loco really is that petty. That’s why New York, Washington, and other states are forming Buy Clean coalitions to cut carbon emissions from transportation and building materials even as the federal government bows out. That means embracing electric vehicles and equipping homes and offices with heat pumps. But cleaning up these sectors will also require eliminating carbon emissions that come from producing the materials that roads and buildings are made from.

Nine states have enacted Buy Clean laws to boost demand for lower carbon steel, concrete, asphalt, glass, and other industrial products. California enacted the nation’s first such policy in 2017, followed in subsequent years by Oregon, Colorado, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Agencies in other states are starting to adopt similar strategies, starting by collecting emissions data about products used in public works projects.

“We’ve invested a lot in policies to improve the energy efficiency of buildings,” Hanna Waterstrat, director of the Washington State efficiency and environmental performance office, told Canary Media recently. ​“But the footprint of the materials — from the manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance, and disposal — can actually be the equivalent of, or bigger than, the entire greenhouse gas footprint of operating a building through its lifetime.”

The so-called embodied carbon in construction projects represents a significant share of the world’s annual emissions, with an estimated 11% coming from materials used in buildings alone, primarily because manufacturers use enormous amounts of fossil fuels to make products like steel and cement. State authorities and companies have tended to overlook these emissions when assessing the climate impact of a new office building or highway. “That’s been a gap in the land of climate and energy policy so far,” said Waterstrat.

Buy Clean Initiative Is Dead At The Federal Level

Until last month, the states working to shrink that policy gap had a powerful partner in the federal government. The Biden administration created the Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership in 2023 to build on existing efforts and accelerate the US market for cleaner construction materials. Federal agencies designated billions of dollars in climate funding to help state governments and contractors track emissions and to enable domestic manufacturers to decarbonize their operations. All that has now gone out the window, but state agencies and industry associations say they are moving ahead on their own to slash embodied carbon.

“Buy Clean is a great example of how states and other non-federal actors can continue to press forward on climate action, regardless of what the federal government does,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the US Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of two dozen governors that is working to increase collaboration among the 13 states that joined the federal-state Buy Clean initiative. In recent weeks it has downloaded the datasets, analytical tools, and other relevant resources that the new administration could wipe from the internet. Katims noted that the alliance formed under similar circumstances in 2017, after the US broke its promise it made to the world in Paris in December of 2015 for the first time. “It’s quite literally in our DNA to sustain climate work at the state level,” he said.

Under the Buy Clean programs, companies bidding on contracts to construct new public buildings, roads, or bridges must show they can not only compete on cost but also on the carbon intensity of their concrete or steel. That in turn creates demand for more cleanly produced products. To implement Buy Clean policies, state agencies start by requiring suppliers to furnish environmental product declarations which provide granular data about the emissions associated with extracting, manufacturing, and transporting individual materials. Defining criteria for individual products involves lengthy discussions between state authorities and industry groups. The EPDs themselves can cost companies thousands of dollars and dozens of hours to complete.

In 2021, the Washington State Legislature commissioned a pilot study to collect data about both the environmental impacts and labor standards related to materials used in five state construction projects. Three years later, the state adopted its Buy Clean and Buy Fair law, which requires state agencies and public universities to report on the impacts of concrete, wood, and steel products purchased for new state-owned building projects. Waterstrat said her team has since developed specifications and language for companies to follow to ease the process of bidding on projects. Her office is also creating a database for EPDs to show the carbon intensity of the materials the state procures and to inform future policy makers.

Limiting The Carbon Footprint Of Building Materials

Eventually, the idea is to set limits around products’ carbon footprints — but for now, the state’s law doesn’t call for that. “Just having that knowledge and data is really the first step in understanding what your procurement choices are,” according to Waterstrat, who said she is ​“hopeful it will lead project owners to select lower-carbon materials.” A handful of states that are gathering EPDs also require construction products to meet certain emissions thresholds, which are known as global warming potential limits.

In 2022, California’s Buy Clean policy began requiring that structural steel, concrete reinforcing steel, flat glass, and insulation used in public works projects meet GWP limits equal to or below the industry average. The Buy Clean Colorado Act similarly calls for setting industry average thresholds for three types of steel, as well as asphalt, concrete, glass, and wood used in new state projects from January 2024 on. Next year, Colorado’s Office of the State Architect will review those limits and report to the Legislature on the program’s progress.

New York set GWP standards in 2023 for concrete mixes used in all state building and transportation projects, making it the first state to do so. The Buy Clean Concrete guidelines, which began as voluntary, became mandatory last month. The current threshold is equivalent to 150% of the emissions for average concrete mixes in the eastern US. The idea is to create a policy that’s initially attainable not just for major manufacturers but also ​“mom-and-pop concrete plants” in rural parts of the state ​“for whom this is all fairly new,” said Mariane Jang, a senior policy advisor on the resiliency and sustainability team in New York state’s Office of General Services. Starting in 2027, the limits will begin getting lower to reflect ongoing efforts to slash emissions from cement and concrete production. In the meantime, ​“the aim is to do more capacity-building and to engage even those smaller companies to prepare them for the upcoming changes,” Jang said.

Regulations, of course, are seen as a curse by MAGAlomaniacs, who say they cost too much and create delays. Of course, being tools of the fossil fuel industries, they refuse to take into account what effect human activity has on the environment. The unstable genius now occupying the Offal Office claims sea levels have only risen a few tenths of an inch since fourteen hundred and ninety-two when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a fact that is demonstrably false. Now that the US government has gone full MAGA, aided and abetted by the crazy carpetbagger from Pretoria, cooperation between the states who refuse to knuckle under to madness rampant throughout the federal government is at an all time low. Much of the funding designated to support the state level Buy Clean initiatives is now stuck in administrative purgatory, including a $160 million grant program by the Environmental Protection Agency to help dozens of businesses develop ​“high-quality” EPDs for 14 material categories.

The National Asphalt Pavement Association was selected designated to receive $10 million of that funding. Richard Willis, who manages its team that works on engineering and sustainability issues said the industry association has developed widely used software that helps asphalt-mix producers develop and publish EPDs for individual plants and mixtures. But using the tool costs companies around $3,000 to $6,000 per plant.

Willis said the EPA funding would be used to reduce costs and other barriers for asphalt-mix producers while helping fill in the ​“data gaps” from the businesses that supply additives. The contents of asphalt pavement — made from aggregate and a liquid petroleum-based binder — can vary widely depending on the local climate and the types of ingredients available nearby. “Asphalt is about as local of a material as it gets,” Willis said. That makes it tricky to create robust EPDs using general industry information or to develop plans for curbing emissions at a given plant.

A $1.2 billion program from the Federal Highway Administration is similarly ensnared in the federal funding freeze. In November, the FHWA selected transportation agencies in 37 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico to receive grants to help them study, track, and ultimately purchase cleaner materials for roads and highways. New York was designated to receive $31.9 million, which is now in limbo. The grant would’ve been especially helpful for New York manufacturers and suppliers working to develop EPDs. State construction projects that use over 8,000 short tons of asphalt are now required to gather such data; projects of all sizes will have to do the same starting in 2026. New York’s policy, Executive Order 22, also requires agencies to report the quantities of concrete mixes, five types of steel products, and three types of glass products procured for state projects and provide EPDs when available.

“Even with that [funding uncertainty], we’re not losing the emphasis on sustainable pavements and low-carbon materials, because we’re in New York state — we have laws on the books,” Barkevich said. He added that companies and agencies in the state have worked together for years to curb emissions from asphalt production, including by reducing temperatures used in asphalt-mixing plants and incorporating more recycled material.

Program leaders in all Buy Clean states said they continue to meet quarterly to learn from each other’s experiences. Such collaboration is especially pertinent now that the federal government is stepping back, said Ted Fertik, vice president for manufacturing and industrial policy at the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups. “There’s a broad recognition that, in most cases, one state’s procurement is probably not sufficient to drive large scale shifts in production processes, so there will need to be more intentional efforts around harmonizing [state efforts] to drive decarbonization,” he said.

America has a choice. It can either address changes in the environment in thoughtful ways, or it can choose to follow the dictates of a leader who stomps around like a two-year-old with a full diaper. Governing is hard work, but someone has to do it, especially when the federal government refuses to do so.