Overview
Embodied carbon represents the emissions that result from the mining, harvesting, processing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, and use of products and materials, as well as end-of-life emissions associated with the disposal of those materials.
In line with the ethos of Leading by Example, New York State is one of the early adopters across the country of regulations requiring State agencies to account for embodied carbon in their procurement activities. New York is also part of an initial group of states that have joined the Federal-State Buy Clean Partnership to collaborate on that effort nationwide.
New York State’s effort will make a significant contribution to the reduction of the State’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and their environmental effects by making transparent how much embodied carbon is associated with capital projects. This data will help inform future decisions for reducing embodied carbon.
OGS and NYSERDA lead this work at the State, having developed two sets of guidance on reducing embodied carbon in construction in 2023.
In June 2023, Governor Hochul issued Executive Order 22: Embodied Carbon Guidance to drive the demand for EPDs in the market, bolster the market for reduced embodied carbon materials, and benchmark New York State’s performance on the environmental impact of our construction materials with a view to setting limits in the future.
Following Governor Hochul’s signing of State Finance Law §136-d, OGS, with the support of NYSERDA, convened a stakeholder and expert group to gain valuable insight and assistance in the production of guidelines for the use and innovation of low embodied carbon concrete in New York State construction projects. The group included State agency and authority officials, including the Department of Transportation, the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It also included licensed professional engineers, licensed registered architects, representatives of the construction industry, representatives of an accredited school of civil engineering, and knowledgeable sources from think tanks, nonprofit environmental organizations, and academia. In September 2023, this group released New York State’s Buy Clean Concrete Guidelines, the first low carbon concrete requirement for multiple state entities in the nation.
The Buy Clean Concrete Guidelines enacts several recommendations from New York’s Climate Action Council Scoping Plan, including those in the buildings chapter for making embodied carbon transparent and adopting lower carbon specifications for high-intensity materials for State projects. It also implements Industry recommendations for identifying carbon-intense materials and develops standards for reducing the environmental impact of building materials.