A Sector Under Pressure
If you work on climate and sustainability issues within a construction materials company, thank you — you are navigating a complex landscape and shouldering an outsized share of the transition burden. The signals coming at you are increasing and inconsistent. Procurement officers are asking for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). Corporate customers want product-level carbon data for Scope 3 reporting. Europe is rolling out carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM) and Digital Product Passports (DPPs). USGBC’s LEED v5 has made embodied carbon reporting a prerequisite for certification. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government pull back from climate commitments has left a patchwork of state and local requirements that vary in scope, methodology, and timeline. Fuel costs are volatile. Input materials are facing disruptions. And we’re still figuring out how AI will impact us all.
Are we having fun yet?
A Pep Talk
The construction materials industry is also the industry that houses, employs, and connects humanity. It makes spaces beautiful. It rebuilds after disasters. It will construct the future we envision. And, that is precisely why the people working to decarbonize it from the inside matter so much, and why this particular moment of disruption is also a defining moment: how will you influence your company, your sector, and the way we live on this earth for generations?
In times of disruption, the companies – and individuals in them– that come through stronger are rarely the ones that waited for the dust to settle. They are the ones that leverage ambiguity to do the hard work: building internal knowledge, deepening their understanding of where they stand relative to where the market is heading, investing in change before they are required to comply. They show up constructively where standards are being written — not to defend the status quo, but to shape something better.
The frameworks that will govern how product-level environmental impact is measured, reported, and compared across global markets are still being written. Standards committees and data infrastructure providers — my organization included — are actively seeking input from manufacturers. Manufacturers who engage will help shape policies, platforms and standards that reflect the realities of production. Those who stay on the sidelines will inherit frameworks shaped by others.
A Case for Robust Transparency & Standardization
Done right, transparency is not just another compliance burden. It is the mechanism by which markets reward genuine performance — and how sustainability initiatives eventually become standard operating procedures. And when that transparency is standardized, the vision is that you can do the “math” once and it will serve many purposes.
When product-level environmental data is verified, comparable, and accessible, procurement officers gain the confidence to specify lower-carbon materials. Financial institutions can evaluate transition risk and structure favorable financing for manufacturers whose data supports real performance improvements. Corporate buyers can meet their own supply chain obligations without building parallel verification systems from scratch. Credible data is not just a checkbox. It is a differentiator that opens doors and, increasingly, determines which doors exist at all.
That value only materializes when data is interoperable, when “carbon intensity” – or any other priority environmental indicator – can be easily normalized whether the buyer or seller is in Sacramento, Stuttgart, Surat, or Soweto. That requires genuine participation from manufacturers. Fragmented data infrastructure produces confusion that delays purchasing decisions, multiplies compliance costs, and creates space for greenwashing claims that undermine confidence in the whole system, including yours.
A Global Lens
The global south is in the middle of the largest construction buildout in human history, and decisions being made now about which materials are used in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — and at what carbon intensity — will shape earth’s emissions trajectories for decades. There is a real possibility those markets are able to leapfrog emissions-intensive technologies rather than replicating them. That is an extraordinary opportunity, and one we will squander if manufacturers, data providers, standards developers, and policymakers cannot agree on a common language for measuring and communicating product-level climate performance. I’ve had to remind myself to not let the pursuit of perfect data be the enemy of data that is good enough to act on. We need to land on the sweet spot and iterate from there.
An Open Invitation
And so, whether your concern is climate impact, supply chain resilience, access to capital, or the practical reality of fuel costs and input material availability, the answer points in the same direction: invest in your decarbonization story — in primary, product-, and facility-level data, robust EPDs, and the product and manufacturing innovation that gives you something credible to say. The frameworks, the markets, the financing structures that reward verified performance are being built in real time, with or without you.
The good news is the invitation is still open. Join us.
Alison Kinn Bennett is Executive Director of Building Transparency, the nonprofit stewarding EC3, an open-access environmental product data platform for decarbonizing the construction industry. She joined Building Transparency in October 2025 after 28 years with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she led federal initiatives on environmentally preferable purchasing, embodied carbon, and sustainable buildings. She is a member of ACLCA’s Product Category Rule Standards Committee and the ISO / Greenhouse Gas Protocol Product-Level Carbon Accounting Joint Working Group.
| A BRIEF PRIMER: THE DATA & STANDARDIZATION LANDSCAPE
The frameworks below are interconnected but were developed by different bodies for different purposes. Understanding how they relate — and where they conflict — is where the real work of interoperability & lasting impact lives. |
| • Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) — ISO 14025 / ISO 21930 / EN 15804: Third-party verified, lifecycle-based disclosures of a product’s environmental impacts, including embodied carbon (known as Global Warming Potential or GWP). ISO 14025 governs EPD principles; ISO 21930 provides the core product category rule for construction products. EN 15804 is the European parallel — similar in intent but with mandatory requirements that diverge from ISO in ways that matter for global comparability. In North America, the ACLCA PCR Open Standard v2 — currently in development with broad stakeholder input — is working to strengthen EPD data quality and comparability requirements.
• Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) — ISO 14067 / GHG Protocol Scope 3: PCFs answer a similar question to EPDs — what is the carbon footprint of this product? — but with a narrower scope and different methodological rules. The bridges between these frameworks and the EPD system are still being built. • Construction Products Regulation (CPR) / Digital Product Passports (DPPs): The CPR now mandates EPD-based GWP disclosure for covered construction products in the EU, with additional impact categories required after 2030. Digital Product Passports are an emerging EU digital layer that will aggregate some EPD data alongside other product information. • Buy Clean Policies: Procurement programs using EPDs for transparency requirements and/or to set maximum embodied carbon thresholds for publicly purchased construction materials. Eight U.S. states now have active embodied carbon procurement requirements, and LEED v5 has introduced embodied carbon as a prerequisite — signals that EPD-based procurement for construction is becoming baseline, not aspirational. • Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM): A trade policy tool placing a carbon price on imports of emissions-intensive materials such as cement, steel, and aluminum. Rolling out in the EU, its data requirements overlap with but do not perfectly match DPP requirements under CPR or EPD requirements under Buy Clean or carbon accounting approaches for PCF & GHGP Scope 3 — meaning manufacturers need to report climate impacts in multiple ways for the same product. |
