SB5322 – Requiring environmental and labor reporting on materials for public building construction and renovation.
Prime Sponsor – Senator Wellman (D; 41st District; Mercer Island) (Co-Sponsors Hasegawa, Keiser, Valdez, Claire Wilson – Ds)
(By request of the Department of Commerce.)
Current status – Had a hearing in the Senate Committee on State Government & Elections January 27th, and passed out of committee that day. Had a hearing in the Senate Committee on Environment, Energy & Technology January 31st. Replaced by a substitute making some minor changes and passed out of committee February 10th. Referred to Ways & Means, and had a hearing there on February 22nd.
Next step would be – Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
HB1282 is a companion bill in the House.

Comments –
This is a somewhat revised version of Senator Stanford’s SB5366, which was introduced in 2021 and then in 2022 as a companion bill to Representative Duerr’s bills in those sessions, but wasn’t heard.

Substitute –
There’s a staff summary of the minor changes in the substitute at the beginning of it.

Summary –
The bill would require public institutions of higher educations’ and state agencies’ contracts for construction and renovation projects to require reports of environmental information by cost of certain construction materials for buildings over 50,000 sq.ft., and additional information about labor standards in producing the materials for buildings over 100,000 sq ft. It would cover structural concrete, reinforcing and structural steel, and engineered wood products; they’d be due before substantial completion of a project. Firms that were selected for projects would have to provide data on quantities of covered products, current environmental product declarations for at least 90% of the value of those; any completed health product declarations; manufacturers’ names and locations; any supplier codes of conduct, and any certifications of firms by the Office of Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises. They’d have to ask their suppliers of each covered product in the larger projects for the names and locations of the actual production facilities and a specified report on working conditions for all employees at those, or the steps taken to reasonably obtain that data. (However, they wouldn’t be required to verify any information provided by suppliers, and they’d be exempted from requesting information about working conditions that would cause a significant delay in completion, a significant increase in overall project cost, or result in only one supplier being able to provide the product.)

By July 1, 2024, specifications for a project contract would only be allowed to include performance-based specifications for structural concrete unless that wasn’t practicable. The bill would continue the public database of provided data that was funded in the 2021-2023 budget, and publish the global warming potentials reported in the environmental product declarations. Commerce would have to further elaborate covered product definitions; develop measurement and reporting standards to ensure that data was consistent and comparable; as well as creating model language for specifications, bid documents, and contracts to support the implementation of the reporting requirements. The department would also produce an educational brief providing an overview of embodied carbon; describing the appropriate use of environmental product declarations, including the preconditions needed for them to be comparable; outlining reporting standards, including covered product definitions, standards for reporting quantities, and working conditions; describing the data collection and reporting required by the bill; providing instructions for the use of the database; and listing applicable product category rules for covered products.

If funds were appropriated for it, the Department of Commerce would be authorized to provide financial assistance to small businesses to help offset the costs of producing environmental product declarations and reducing embodied carbon in the built environment, while ensuring they weren’t put at a competitive disadvantage in state contracting as a result of the bill’s requirements.

It would require Commerce to convene a Buy Clean and Buy Fair workgroup with representatives from a specified list of stakeholders to identify opportunities for and barriers to growing the use and production of low carbon materials, promoting high labor standards in manufacturing, and preserving and expanding low carbon materials manufacturing in the state. The group would consider state and domestic supply of raw materials and other supply chain challenges, regulatory barriers, competitiveness of local and domestic manufacturers, costs, and data availability from local, state, national, and foreign product suppliers. It would identify opportunities to encourage the continued conversion to lower carbon cements. By September 2025, it would submit a report on policy recommendations to the Legislature and the Governor. The report would summarize data collected through the bill and other previous projects, make recommendations for improving environmental production declaration data quality and for ways of mitigating Scope 2 emissions through green power purchases, identify barriers and opportunities to the effective use of the database and collected data, and survey the regulatory landscape to identify areas of alignment and discrepancy between local, state, federal, and private policy on embodied carbon and identify opportunities to promote consistency across policies, rules, and regulations.