Federal Buy Clean Initiative

Embodied emissions refer to the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the extraction, production, transport, and manufacturing of material. Low embodied carbon materials have less climate impact associated with mining, manufacturing and transportation. Traditionally, steel, concrete, asphalt, and flat glass contain a high quantity of embodied emissions due to the energy-intensive processes used to extract raw materials like limestone, taconite ore, and silica and then converting those raw materials via industrial processes to produce an end product.

Buy Clean is a procurement policy to promote the purchase of construction materials and products with lower embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, taking into account the life-cycle emissions associated with the production of those materials.

Today, the U.S. manufacturing sector is responsible for nearly a third of U.S. GHG emissions, with the production of steel, concrete, asphalt, and flat glass accounting for nearly half of all U.S. manufacturing GHG emissions. By leveraging the Federal Government's massive purchasing power to support the purchase of American-made steel, concrete, asphalt, and flat glass products with lower embodied emissions, the Federal Government can provide a large and stable signal necessary to advancing the country's industrial capacity to supply the goods and materials of the future while growing good jobs for American workers and significantly reducing the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Based on a recognition of industry best practice, the Federal Buy Clean Initiative is using product-specific type III Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) as the primary data source for implementation. EPDs take into account a life cycle analysis of multiple environmental impacts, including GHGs at all stages of production. EPDs are similar to nutrition labels on a food product but focus on a materials' environmental and sustainable attributes. The Buy Clean Task Force will continue to identify and pursue opportunities to improve EPDs to ensure they are suitable, consistent and comparable for integration into Federal procurement policies. This information can be supplemented by facility-level energy efficiency benchmarking data such as ENERGY STAR Energy Performance Indicators for industrial plants.

The Federal Government has made great progress in considering the overall climate impacts of new and upgraded construction projects, including applying integrative design principles, whole project life cycle assessment, and sustainable pavements tools. Agencies have also begun to investigate using innovative materials, such as structural mass timber and wood products, that can drastically lower the overall carbon footprint of a building. Buy Clean complements these efforts by ensuring that when designing clean, energy-efficient, net zero infrastructure we are not forgetting the "embodied emissions" in the construction materials that can be equal to the emissions generated over decades of operating the building.