The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced plans to implement a new labeling program to boost clean American manufacturing by helping federal purchasers and other buyers find and buy cleaner, more climate-friendly construction materials and products. The label program will define what constitutes “clean” construction materials in support of the federal “Buy Clean Initiative,” which aims to grow the market for American-made, lower carbon construction materials. EPA’s label program will prioritize glass, concrete, steel, and asphalt because they represent the vast majority of construction materials and products that government agencies purchase with federal funds.
EPA will implement the program using a phased approach that all material categories will be able to follow at a cadence that aligns with the material’s market maturity and data availability. These phases are: (1) Data Quality Improvement to standardize and improve the quality of data underlying and provided by Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs); (2) Threshold Setting using robust EPDs, data, and other credible and representative industry benchmarks to determine thresholds for specific material categories and types; and (3) Labeling Materials and Products that meet EPA’s criteria.
EPA also issued several supporting documents to help implement the label program, including Product Category Rule (PCR) Criteria – guidelines for developing EPDs, the disclosures that communicate climate and other environmental impacts of products. Other documents published today outline key remaining data gaps, provide a methodology for assessing life cycle data quality, and describe other federal data quality improvement activities.