HB1103 – Requires environmental product declarations and reporting on labor issues for materials used in constructing and renovating State buildings.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Duerr (D; 1st District; Bothell) (Co-Sponsor Shewmake – D)
Current status – Had a hearing in Appropriations January 25th. Still in committee at cutoff.
Next step would be – Dead bill.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
SB5366 is a companion bill in the Senate.
In the House 2021-
Had a hearing in the House Committee on the Capitol Budget January 26th. Replaced by a substitute, amended, and passed out of committee February 17th. Wasn’t heard before cutoff for bills in fiscal committees.
In the House 2022 –
Reintroduced in Appropriations.
Comments –
Unlike Representative Doglio’s 2020 bill, HB2744, this simply requires reporting, rather than prioritizing low carbon materials in awarding contracts. (That bill passed the House Committee on the Capital Budget, but died in Appropriations; there was a good deal of testimony at the hearing).
Summary –
The substitute made a number of minor changes, which are summarized by staff at the beginning of it. The changes made by the first amendment are summarized at the end of that; the second amendment merely added one item to the reporting requirements.
Original bill –
This new bill covers projects receiving funds from the capital budget for new buildings with more than 25,000 sq ft of occupied or conditioned space, and renovations of such buildings that cost more than 50% of the assessed value.
Beginning July 1st 2021, before the final project payment, firms would be required to submit any available environmental product declarations providing robust full life-cycle assessments of the associated greenhouse gas emissions for 90% by weight of any structural concrete; structural steel; reinforcing steel, including rebar; and engineered wood in the project. They’d also have to submit specified information about measures taken to promote labor rights in the supply chain, and a detailed list of working conditions in the final manufacturing facility and in facilities at which production processes that contribute to 80% or more of the product’s cradle-to-gate global warming potential occur. Starting a year later, they’d be required to submit product declarations and labor data for all the covered materials before the final payment, and starting a year after that, they’d have to submit them before the material was installed. If a firm can’t meet the requirements, it bears the burden of providing evidence to show that the data does not exist in a form that is recorded or transferable; that the requirements would be a hardship relative to the size of the firm or the product supplier based on a specific estimate of costs to collect and transfer the information; or that the requirements would disrupt the selected firm’s ability to perform its contractual obligations. [I’m not sure how the first of these items fits with the point of going from requiring “available” product declarations at the beginning to just requiring them the next year…]
Details –
If funds are made available, the Department of Commerce is authorized to provide financial assistance to small businesses, covering at least half what it costs them to produce one of the required environmental product declarations. Starting January 1, 2026, the environmental product declarations would be required to report actual data quality assessments including variability in facility, product, and upstream data for key processes.
The UW’s College of Built Environments is to create a publicly accessible database for covered projects to anonymize and report the required data and promote transparency.