Amherst College
IL-42: Purchased Building Materials

An institution earns 1 bonus point when it has established embodied carbon targets for new building projects and/or seven or more of the building materials listed below using the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool or an equivalent resource:

• Concrete (ready mixed concrete, slurry, shotcrete)
• Masonry (CMU)
• Steel (rebar, steel wire and mesh, plate steel, structural steel, steel decking, cold formed steel, open-web steel joists)
• Aluminum (aluminum extrusions, thermally improved aluminum extrusions)
• Wood (dimensional lumber, prefabricated wood products, composite lumber, mass timber)
• Sheathing (plywood/OSB sheathing, glass mat gypsum sheathing)
• Thermal/moisture protection (insulation, membrane roofing)
• Cladding (insulated metal panel, metal panel)
• Openings (glazing)
• Finishes (gypsum board, acoustical ceiling tiles, resilient flooring, carpet)
• Network infrastructure (data cabling)
• Asphalt
• Manufacturing inputs (cementitious)

This may include commitments to reductions in embodied carbon from baseline, absolute thresholds of embodied carbon, and/or the consideration of embodied carbon in procurement processes (e.g., prioritizing products that fall within a set percentile of embodied carbon for a material type or including embodied carbon as a consideration in the bid solicitation and appraisal).

Measurement

Report on the current policies and practices. 

This credit is optional.