MassCEC is also working to reduce carbon emissions from one of the most carbon-intensive building materials—concrete. The agency is hiring a consultant to administer a Concrete Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) Kickstarter Initiative. The initiative will provide financial and educational support for concrete plant owners to produce and begin publishing EPDs of their concrete mixes. Once these EPDs are published, customers will have an easier time understanding their choices and specifying lower carbon concrete mixes.
“Our job is to try things,” explains Craig, in speaking of the cutting-edge nature of these MassCEC initiatives. MassCEC pilots novel policy or incentive approaches, readying them for implementation on a larger scale by Mass Save—a much larger utility-funded collaborative offering efficiency services—or other state agencies. That was the case with the Passive House multifamily buildings incentives, which were first offered by MassCEC in 2016 and then picked up by Mass Save in 2017. “There have been 160 buildings representing over 10,000 units of multifamily housing that have used Mass Save’s Passive House incentive to design Passive House multifamily buildings in the four-and-a-half years that incentive has been offered,” Craig notes happily. That’s a whole lot of operational carbon emissions reductions in the state, among other benefits. She is envisioning similar levels of embodied carbon reductions just ahead.
