Setting Thresholds

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EPA will establish thresholds for embodied greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the production stage (extraction, transportation and manufacturing) of construction materials and products. This process will involve defining product types within material categories, determining whether product types have sufficient representative data to set thresholds, developing draft thresholds and issuing them for public comment, refining the thresholds based on industry and other stakeholder input and any additional data provided, and publishing thresholds. To inform this work, EPA will consider:

• Credible and applicable industry averages and benchmarking efforts for the given individual material category and product type.
• Assessments of published EPDs for the product types.
• Other relevant embodied carbon threshold approaches undertaken by industry, federal, state and local agencies and/or other entities.
• Any additional credible and applicable sources of data.

Preliminary information is available in the following document:

Draft Approach for Developing Product-Level Embodied Greenhouse Gas Emissions Thresholds

The  Draft Approach for Developing Product-Level Embodied Greenhouse Gas Emissions Thresholds (pdf) (1.17 MB) establishes a uniform methodological approach to estimate industry averages that can be used as the basis for determining thresholds for similar product types within a given material category.

The threshold methodology is intended to be flexible to reflect variations in data availability and the ways in which product attributes affect functional performance across a broad variety of construction material categories. The methodological approach established in this document may be used for applications such as:

• Establishing benchmarks for threshold setting for the EPA Label Program for Low Embodied Carbon Construction Materials.
• Establishing benchmarks for threshold setting and other policy considerations for state-level Buy Clean programs.
• Identifying country-level embodied GHG emissions for trade purposes.
• Establishing thresholds and benchmarks for green construction rating systems, standards and codes.
• Supporting Scope 3 GHG inventories for reporting under the GHG Protocol and related efforts.

Additional information about EPA’s threshold setting process, including public notice and comment, is available in the Label Program Approach (pdf) (2.62 MB) .

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