States are moving forward with Buy Clean policies despite Trump reversal

Yahoo

20-02-2025

Cutting fossil fuels out of transportation and buildings will mean embracing electric vehicles and equipping homes and offices with heat pumps. But cleaning up these sectors will take much more than tackling their energy supply — it'll also require eliminating carbon emissions that come from producing the materials that roads and buildings are made of.
A growing number of states are starting to do just that, with policies that take a more holistic view of the climate challenge.
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, including by collecting emissions data about products used in public works projects.
'We've [historically] invested a lot in policies to improve the energy efficiency of buildings,' said Hanna Waterstrat, director of the Washington State Department of Commerce's state efficiency and environmental performance office. '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. That's largely because manufacturers consume huge 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, say, a new office tower or highway.
'That's been a gap in the land of climate and energy policy so far,' said Waterstrat, who leads her department's efforts to implement Washington's Buy Clean and Buy Fair strategy.
Until last month, the states working to shrink that policy gap had a powerful partner in the federal government.
The Biden administration launched the Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership in 2023 to build upon existing efforts and accelerate the U.S. 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.
President Donald Trump has since abandoned the federal Buy Clean strategy and is attempting to rescind related grant programs. The about-face will undoubtedly delay a deep transformation of the country's construction sector. But state agencies and industry associations say they're forging ahead — guided by their own laws and commitments to slash embodied carbon.
'Buy Clean is a great example of how states and other nonfederal actors can continue to press forward on climate action, regardless of what the federal government does,' said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of two dozen governors.
The group is working to maintain collaboration among the 13 states that joined the federal-state Buy Clean initiative, and in recent weeks it has downloaded the datasets, analytical tools, and other relevant resources that the Trump administration could wipe from the internet. Katims noted that the alliance formed under similar circumstances in 2017, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the first time.
'It's quite literally in our DNA to sustain climate work at the state level,' he said.
The broader Buy Clean vision is to harness the government's massive purchasing power to jump-start the private market for low-carbon industrial materials. Companies bidding to construct new public buildings or bridges must show they can not only compete on cost but also on the carbon intensity of their concrete or steel, which in turn creates demand for more cleanly produced products.
Today, states are largely still laying the foundation for this future reality.
The first place many agencies start is by requiring suppliers to furnish environmental product declarations. EPDs, which are often likened to climate nutrition labels, 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 working on a database for EPDs to show the carbon intensity of the materials the state procures and to inform future policymaking. 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,' Waterstrat said, adding that she's '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 four categories — 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, for its part, 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 U.S. 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.
However, starting in 2027, the limits will progressively 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.
The ability to gather accurate data from many disparate suppliers is essential to achieving the ultimate goal of Buy Clean: slashing embodied carbon from construction materials.
That work will potentially get harder if the Trump administration succeeds in its attempts to claw back congressionally mandated climate and energy spending.
Among the funding stuck in political purgatory is a nearly $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 last year to receive $10 million of that funding, which hasn't yet made it out the door, according to Richard Willis, who manages the organization's team that works on engineering and sustainability issues. 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 Trump's 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 tapped to receive $31.9 million, though because the funding wasn't legally obligated before Trump took office, it's unclear if the state will ever actually get it, said Bruce Barkevich, who is vice president of the New York Construction Materials Association, a trade group representing producers of asphalt, aggregate, and ready-mix concrete in the state.
The timing of 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.
Emily Rubenstein, the deputy commissioner for resiliency and sustainability in New York state's Office of General Services, said her team continues to press ahead with the state's Buy Clean strategy, including by hosting public webinars, meeting with industry, and training staff in various state agencies. The office is also currently analyzing embodied-carbon data from state projects with the goal of identifying future pathways for reducing embodied carbon.
'This work takes a village, and we've been thrilled with how both supporting agencies and industries have been in [backing] the transition,' she said, adding that she's also glad the U.S. Climate Alliance has picked up the mantle of organizing states.
In New York and other Buy Clean states, program leaders said they're still meeting quarterly through the climate alliance and trading notes to learn from each other's experiences. Such collaboration is especially pertinent now that the biggest player in the game — 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,' Fertik said. 'So there will need to be more intentional efforts around harmonizing [state efforts] to drive decarbonization.'