Climate advocates often highlight the transformative potential of emergent products, while noting on the margins potential impediments due to technological constraints, higher costs, or fixed consumer preferences. By contrast, a new paper from the Sabin Center, Platform Gatekeeping in the Building-Materials Sector: Competition Law and the Pace of Low-Carbon Construction, foregrounds threats to clean-tech innovation posed by emergent forms of market consolidation. It probes recent developments in the building-materials sector, where numerous technologies show significant emissions-reduction potential, but would need to clear looming market bottlenecks before scaling up as viable green alternatives. The paper shows that while such bottlenecks can occur at various stages of the building-sector supply chain (manufacturing, distribution, and/or installation), today’s most acute competition concerns come from the rapid rise of two massive distribution platforms.
The climate implications of these trends can be summarized as follows: low-carbon building technologies typically first reach consumers through niche premium products, costing more than comparable conventional products. While these premium products might pay for themselves over time through reduced energy costs, that payback period can extend ten years or longer. Given that the U.S. building sector already faces historic cost pressures, as well as perennial split-incentive problems in which property developers do not pay for building-occupants’ energy usage, even mild price inflations caused by anticompetitive corporate tactics can push premium low-carbon products out of reach for most Americans.
At present, Home Depot’s and QXO’s increasing dominance of building-materials distribution threatens to impose precisely these market dynamics, while allowing two private firms to dictate the pace of sector-wide low-carbon transformation. As digital platforms controlling commercial access for a vast portfolio of products and services, and as conglomerates deeply entwined with manufacturer incumbents, Home Depot and QXO have strong incentives to maintain a carbon-intensive status quo, rather than to facilitate the disruptive breakthroughs necessary to meet today’s climate crisis.
Key findings of the paper include:
Sprawling conglomerate platforms have rapidly formed in the U.S. building-materials sector. Home Depot has shifted its basic business model from a one-stop-shop for DIY homeowners, to an all-encompassing platform ecosystem for professional contractors, through roughly $25 billion in corporate acquisitions since 2024. Meanwhile, though only founded in 2023, QXO already has become the nation’s largest distributor in insulation and waterproofing, the nation’s second largest distributor in roofing, and the largest distributor of lumber and other building materials in key geographies.
Low-carbon building technologies, including cool roofs, high-efficiency insulation, cross-laminated timber (CLT), and green gypsum show significant promise. But as Home Depot and QXO continue to expand their distribution holdings, and now even develop their own product lines, they crowd out possibilities for true market disruptors to compete.
Antitrust authorities have recently articulated powerful enforcement frameworks tailored to emergent market harms, such as: serial acquisitions by a single firm, sector-wide “arms races” trending towards consolidation, platform self-preferencing, anticompetitive product bundling, and vertical foreclosure. While these lines of analysis remain relatively novel, low-carbon product development offers an optimal context to apply them, since climate change predictably necessitates emissions-mitigating innovations across our economy.
Climate policy and competition policy must be effectively harmonized in order to unleash low-carbon breakthroughs. For example, public-procurement mandates can wield powerful economic clout, but also remain highly susceptible to anticompetitive price markups by climate-complacent market gatekeepers. Low-carbon rebate programs and tax breaks likewise require robust competition to optimize their impacts.
Read the white paper, Platform Gatekeeping in the Building-Materials Sector: Competition Law and the Pace of Low-Carbon Construction, in Columbia Law School’s Scholarship Archive. This is the second paper in a series examining how competition policy affects the uptake of emissions-mitigating technological innovation. Our first paper examined alternative-proteins markets, where food conglomerates’ control of slaughterhouses, distribution, and retail shelf space poses constraints on nascent low-carbon industries. The building-materials sector presents similar structural tensions, but with the most acute chokepoints occurring at distribution rather than production stages, and with the gatekeepers rapidly fortifying their new positions, largely without challenge.
Andy Fitch is a Climate and Business Law Fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
Cynthia Hanawalt is the Director of Climate and Business Law at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
