On his first day in office President Trump axed the Biden-era federal Buy Clean program. Buy Clean was designed to leverage the federal government’s buying power to help grow the low carbon building materials industry. Killing it will have consequences—buildings are responsible for a major share of global carbon dioxide emissions, and around half of those emissions come from producing and transporting the materials that go into them—but it does not spell the end for policy supporting low carbon construction.
Low carbon buildings are ones that use construction materials produced and transported with lower greenhouse gas emissions than traditional materials, that are designed to use less material overall, that use recycled components, or that are retrofits of existing buildings obviating the need for new construction material altogether. The Buy Clean program, created by President Biden in an Executive Order, broadly sought to catalyze the development of low carbon buildings. President Biden’s Executive Order directed the Federal Government to “use its scale and procurement power to achieve … net-zero emissions from Federal Procurement, including a Buy Clean policy to promote use of construction materials with lower embodied emissions.” The goal was not just to reduce federal buildings’ impacts, but to stimulate the low carbon construction materials industry and develop techniques that the private sector, states, and cities could borrow to use less material in construction.
President Trump’s Executive Order rescinded Biden’s wholesale, but added that “agencies shall prioritize cost-effectiveness, American workers and businesses, and the sensible use of taxpayer money.” If agencies are going to do so, they should continue to Buy Clean.
Low carbon buildings are good business. Embodied carbon in materials makes up the lion’s share of emissions attributable to development through its supply chain. Reducing up-front carbon can cost little to no more than other approaches—a recent RMI report found ways to reduce projects’ initial embodied carbon by almost half for less than 1% extra cost. Doing so, as well as designing to reduce the quantity of materials used and prioritizing retrofitting over new construction, greatly reduces total emissions and cuts construction costs. That also lessens the emissions that need to be reported through embodied carbon disclosure laws like those in place in the California, Oregon, and Washington, and lessens the emissions to be reported under more general climate disclosure laws like California’s.
In part because of the successes that the Buy Clean program had, there is a still-growing industry around low carbon buildings and a set of tools that agencies can tap into to continue Buying Clean. The program was the impetus for the first nationally-applicable lower-carbon standards for concrete and asphalt from the General Services Administration; the Federal Highway Administration’s $1.2 billion in awards to facilitate using low carbon materials on Federal-aid infrastructure projects; and the Department of Energy’s Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap. In addition, the Buy Clean program advanced efforts to measure buildings’ lifecycle carbon impacts, to reduce embodied carbon in overseas construction projects, and to support research into biomaterials with lower carbon intensity. These are tools that the private sector, states, cities, and government agencies in future administrations can pick up and run with.
States are already building on those successes and will continue their leading role in this space. Under the Buy Clean California Act, the State of California and its universities are required to purchase materials with embodied carbon below set limits. Similarly, Washington’s Buy Clean and Buy Fair law requires state entities to obtain and make publicly available declarations about the embodied carbon in the construction materials they are purchasing. Oregon’s Buy Clean law requires the state’s Department of Transportation to develop a program to study materials’ embodied carbon by the end of this year. Those efforts are not only driving change in their states but are also providing models to facilitate additional states’ following suit.
On top of those individual efforts, multistate partnerships have sprung up to further facilitate information sharing and make it easier for additional states to adopt their own Buy Clean policies. Regional efforts, like the Pacific Coast Collaborative, are bringing together states and cities to coordinate efforts at building regional demand for low carbon materials. And the Biden Administration’s Buy Clean program launched a Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership through which states could collaborate with each other and send a consistent message to the marketplace. Though the federal program has been terminated, the state partnership lives on as the State Buy Clean Partnership, now run by the nonprofit U.S. Climate Alliance.
Rescinding the federal Buy Clean program is a setback for low carbon buildings but building in ways that meet prevailing embodied carbon standards—or not building at all, and instead retrofitting existing buildings—are still smart ways to cut costs. In other words, low carbon construction is consistent with the current edict that federal agencies “prioritize cost-effectiveness … and the sensible use of taxpayer money.” In addition, low carbon construction materials continue to be required by a growing cadre of states. And the reasons that private developers are moving in this direction remain strong.
Dan Metzger is a Senior Fellow with the Cities Climate Law Initiative at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
