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The US DOT has a new strategy to reduce pollution: promoting green building materials for transportation projects. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions created during the construction process is a key way to make the nation’s transportation systems more environmentally friendly, Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt told Construction Dive.
“We often talk about the amount of GHGs that our transport system produces, but our construction system also produces a lot of GHGs. In fact, almost 10% of GHGs worldwide are produced by the construction sector. So , for us to be able to introduce low-carbon materials that perform at the same level as normal materials is a huge opportunity,” Bhatt said.
As part of the DOT’s push to reduce the environmental impact of the transportation sector with low carbon building materialsThe Federal Highway Administration on Tuesday announced $800 million through the Low Carbon Transportation Materials Program for agencies that conduct transportation activities, not just state DOTs, to reimburse highway builders for using products that generate less pollution.
Shailene Bhatt
There is a wide range of building products that have less built-in carbon, such as pavement that uses recycled plastics or an asphalt process that requires lower heating, Bhatt said.
“The benefit of this financing is this [low-carbon] materials often cost more and have challenges in setting up the supply chain. So that’s what this funding is all about, to make sure that state DOTs, cities, towns, [metropolitan planning organizations] and the tribes have an opportunity to use low-carbon materials,” Bhatt said.
The program, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the FHWA, provides subsidies to cover the cost difference of using construction materials with substantially lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions than standard products, according to an FHWA news release.
Labels for ecological building materials
Earlier this month, the EPA announced its plan to implement a new label program to help shoppers identify more climate-friendly building materials for federal projects. It will define what are “clean” building materials in support of the Buy Clean initiative of the Biden administrationa procurement policy that aims to leverage the federal government’s enormous purchasing power to grow the market for low-carbon, American-made building materials.
Materials commonly used for road and bridge projects include asphalt, cement and steel, and Bhatt said the FHWA worked closely with the General Services Administration and EPA to determine which materials are eligible.
According to EPA, the label program will provide a tiered classification system, and eligible materials will be listed in a publicly accessible central registry for easy identification and purchase. The EPA anticipates this initial products could be labeled in September 2026.
FHWA made $1.2 billion available in this program to state DOTs in March, and is now opening funding to other applicants such as cities, metropolitan planning organizations, tribal governments, and other federal, state, and local agencies that conduct transport activities, according to the release.
DOT aims to boost the industry
The FHWA’s initiative aims to combat inertia around changing the materials builders use, Bhatt said.
“People know what they know, there are concrete plants and other things that exist and there are also low margins in this industry,” Bhatt said. “Those are some of the reasons why these low-carbon materials haven’t been adopted so easily, and that’s why the federal funding is there to help show people that these materials work the same, that the longevity is the same and to help overcome these obstacles so that people will deploy them more easily.”
Builders can soon expect more state and local government agencies to include stipulations for low-carbon materials in their RFPs, Bhatt said. The FHWA plans to host a series of webinars in the fall to help contractors get started with these products.
“I think there’s a huge appetite for people to help reduce their carbon footprint, and so we want to provide the materials so people know exactly what to do,” Bhatt said, so when “we go out and built in the 21st century, we’re not using the same technological materials as we did in the 20th century.”
