Inslee's low carbon task force is long overdue
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee and other Pacific Coast Collaborative leaders recently announced that a Low Carbon Construction Task Force will be created to promote low-carbon materials in buildings and construction projects. This is a unique opportunity to capitalize on and accelerate an idea that is starting to get traction — namely, paying attention to and then reducing the carbon footprint of the materials associated with building construction.
While some building projects are already showing progress on this front, we need to move faster if we are to meet our carbon reduction goals.
One challenge this new task force faces is to act on the simple fact that we can’t manage what we don’t measure, and there is importance for a standard, predictable and transparent process for reporting carbon footprint impacts within new building construction.
The development, design and construction industries have already made inroads by advancing the use of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), which work like nutrition labels for building materials by reporting their climate impacts. EPD use is proliferating, and the free, national EPD database within the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool makes the data more accessible.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2022/01/16/opinion-low-carbon-task-force.html
