SB5391 – Requiring environmental reporting on materials for public construction. (Dead.)
Prime Sponsor – Senator Van De Wege (D; 24th District; Sequim) (Co-Sponsors Schoesler – R, Mullet- D)
Current status – Had a hearing in the Senate Committee on Environment, Energy & Technology January 27th. Still in committee by cutoff.
Next step would be – Dead bill.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
HB1342 is a companion bill in the House.

Comments –
Compare HB1282 and its companion bill…

Summary –
The bill would create requirements for the modeling, measurement, and reporting of embodied carbon emission reductions from structural concrete, reinforcing and structural steel, and engineered wood in state-funded projects, including municipal projects and Department of Transportation contracts. (Buildings under 50,000 sq. ft. wouldn’t be included. )

Designers would have to do life-cycle assessments over 60 years of the embodied carbon in materials they decided were eligible for a project, after considering its requirements, including “project program, financial budget, construction schedule, product availability, and overall constructability.”

Beginning in 2025, the successful bidder for a project would have to submit environmental project declarations for at least 90% of the covered structural materials by weight or volume to the contractor at least a month before the substantial completion of the project. The contractor would be required to forward those to the authority that had awarded the contract and the Department of Commerce. After January 1st, 2027 the process would include submitting these to the contractor when the bid was submitted, and updating the information about the declarations and the actual quantities used before substantial completion.

The project designer or its life-cycle assessment consultant would be required to calculate a baseline estimate of the industry average for embodied carbon emissions in the project’s eligible products, using the emissions intensity factors in the most recently published environmental product declarations, and to include those in the construction specifications used for bidding those eligible products. (If there weren’t published regional or national industry-average environmental declarations for a product, they’d need to use verifiable data from a life-cycle analysis practitioner to estimate the baseline.) When the project was completed, they’d do an estimate of the embodied carbon in the actual products and quantities used in it, and then calculate and report an embodied carbon reduction percentage comparing the actual embodied carbon to what it would have been if industry average materials had been used. They’d also estimate and report the carbon intensity of the project, as a ratio of the kilograms of CO2 equivalents in the covered structural materials to the area of the project in square meters.

Commerce would have to create a new public database to inform project stakeholders of the achievable reductions in embodied carbon for specific markets, products and structural systems, and to inform future reduction targets and stretch goals. The database would include names and types of project, the awarding authority; project dates and zip codes, the type of eligible products in the project; the primary eligible products and primary types of structural systems actually used; a summary of the life-cycle assessment of the structural systems with the range of possible outcomes disclosed; the gross project area, excluding the site outside a building’s footprint; the project’s embodied carbon emissions as calculated with estimated quantities prior to bidding, and the estimate of those with with actual quantities at substantial completion; its estimated embodied carbon intensity prior to bidding; its as-built embodied carbon emissions, embodied carbon reduction percentage; and embodied carbon intensity; and a few other details.

The bill would also require the Department of Commerce to reimburse Washington manufacturers for half the costs of producing environmental product declarations, with limits of $15,000 per manufacturing location or batch plant and $45,000 for each manufacturer and associated companies. (They’d have to be product-specific, third-party reviewed, and completed by the end of 2025 to qualify.)