Recommendations for cradle-to-gate environmental product declarations (EPD) in ‘Buy Clean’ procurement based on CDOT’s experience

Abstract

The use of EPDs in procurement of construction materials has been of increasing interest to government agencies, and adoption in the United States has been driven in part by “Buy Clean” legislation. Buy Clean encompasses green procurement policies that promote the purchase of construction materials and products with lower environmental impacts, considering the life-cycle impacts associated with those materials. Most EPDs for transportation infrastructure construction materials are “cradle-to-gate”, or representative of the material production stage of a product and not the entire life cycle; however, these EPDs can allow meaningful quantitative comparisons of environmental and sustainability indicators and serve as a mechanism for measuring improvements in environmental impacts during the production of materials. This paper describes how cradle-to-gate EPDs are used, presents a case study of initial implementation of an EPD policy by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), and provides recommendations to address some of the challenges that agencies and stakeholders can face when developing or participating in new EPD programs. It is desired that the recommendations and case study presented in this paper will help provide pathways to agencies for the successful enactment of Buy Clean policies and enable mitigation of actual or perceived barriers to program implementation.

Leveraging environmental assessment and environmental justice to deliver equitable, decarbonized built infrastructure

“…Zero-emission infrastructure systems rely on achieving little to no GHG emissions during operation, making embodied emissions significant to address. Regulations and sustainability planning frameworks are being developed to incorporate environmental product declarations (EPDs) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) in order to mitigate GHG emissions from civil infrastructure such as buildings and horizontal construction projects [3,[13][14][15]. EPDs, which are increasingly used in procurement for and environmental reductions in infrastructure projects, catalog selected life-cycle environmental impacts of a product, with GHG emissions the most commonly reported indicator [13].…”