Maximizing the benefits of “Buy Clean” policies for building materials: Six key priorities

Construction material manufacturing accounts for around 10 % of worldwide CO₂ emissions and around one-third of industrial sector CO₂ emissions (IEA, 2020). To accelerate the decarbonization of this “hard to abate” sector, “Buy Clean” procurement initiatives are emerging in North America with initial focuses on energy-intensive building materials such as concrete, structural steel, insulation, and glass. Recent examples include the Buy Clean California Act, the Buy Clean Colorado Act, New York’s Buy Clean Concrete Law, and Washington’s Buy Clean and Buy Fair Act (Carbon Leadership Form, 2024).

While there are other types of policies for regulating embodied emissions (Carbon Leadership Form, 2024), including mandatory building or production technology standards, Buy Clean policies employ a more flexible, market-based approach. Namely, by limiting the embodied—or “cradle to gate”—carbon allowed in public projects worth billions of dollars, they aim to provide strong market incentives for materials manufacturers to adopt whichever low-carbon technologies and practices make sense for their particular plant(s). The allowable embodied carbon thresholds for each material are steadily lowered by policymakers over time, driving industry to make continuous emissions reductions (Waldman et al., 2024).

While Buy Clean policies alone may not be sufficient to fully decarbonize all manufacturing plants, the strong financial incentives they provide can reward leaders and encourage them to continue to make decarbonization investments, prod laggards to catch up, and help accelerate and de-risk adoption of low-carbon technologies, leading to spillover effects at non-covered plants.

These initiatives come at a critical time: the world is falling behind on its industrial sector climate goals, while demand for building materials is rising (IEA, 2020; IEA, 2024). However, Buy Clean initiatives can also be complex, requiring evolving standards, data, and targets and the involvement of many stakeholders to achieve decarbonization goals (Fig. 1). Therefore, for ease of initial implementation, today’s Buy Clean initiatives are still limited in terms of their covered material scopes, environmental objectives, and analytical sophistication.