Buy Clean basics

Buy Clean policies use government purchasing power to reduce the climate impact of construction materials. They commonly ask project teams to disclose the embodied carbon of materials and may set limits or incentives for lower-carbon products.

Embodied carbon

Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas pollution associated with producing, transporting, installing, maintaining, and eventually disposing of a material. For procurement, programs usually focus on a defined set of life-cycle stages so products can be compared consistently.

Environmental Product Declarations

An Environmental Product Declaration, or EPD, is a standardized report describing a product’s environmental impacts. An EPD is a disclosure—not automatically a claim that a product is environmentally preferable.

What agencies decide

An agency designing a Buy Clean program typically establishes:

• which projects and materials are covered;
• which EPDs are acceptable;
• the units and life-cycle stages used for comparison;
• reporting, threshold, incentive, or enforcement rules; and
• how exceptions and missing information are handled.