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2025 CLF North American Material Baselines

Carbon Leadership Forum Material Baselines for North America 2025

The CLF North American Material Baselines Report provides a snapshot of the state of environmental product declarations (EPDs) for North American-produced building materials. This report includes:

  1. Background and methodology
  2. CLF Baselines (industry-average embodied carbon values) 
  3. Detailed results by material category

    Acerca de

    The 2025 CLF North American Material Baselines project continues the work of and builds upon previous CLF Material Baselines reports. This report aims to support decision-makers by providing:

    UN methodology for:

    • categorizing products for appropriate embodied carbon comparisons;
    • collecting and processing embodied carbon data from EPDs; and
    • assessing data sources for their industry representativeness and estimating industry-average embodied carbon values (i.e., “baselines”) per product type.

    Category results, incluido:

    • a “state of EPDs” snapshot of North American construction product EPD GWP data; and
    • a set of CLF baseline GWP values or “CLF Baselines” that represent an estimate of industry-average GHG emissions for construction materials manufactured in North America. Their primary uses are:
      • a basis of comparison; a reference point against which individual products can be evaluated; and
      • default GWP intensity values for project- or assembly-scale modeling.

    2025 CLF Material Baselines for North America Report

    Download Materials Baseline Report
    Table of Values

    Expresiones de gratitud

    The authors would like to thank several individuals for their contributions.

    University of Washington Life Cycle Lab (UW-LCL) data advisors. Milad Ashtiani, UW-LCL Research Engineer, led our data extraction process and supported our data cleaning by developing an initial framework and reviewing later iterations. Monica Huang, UW-LCL Research Engineer, supported data curation, document layout, and data visualization. 

    CLF staff. Meghan Lewis, CLF Program Director, supported the project through funding acquisition, review, and editing. Sindhu Raju, CLF Program Assistant, supported the publication production and data visualization.

    Derechos de autor

    The 2025 CLF North American Material Baselines Report is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

    photo by Tom Fisk
    Report

    Latest revision: 12/19/2025

    Table of Values

    Latest revision: 12/19/2025

    Autores

    The following individuals from the Foro de liderazgo de carbono (CLF) authored this report.

    • Brook Waldman, Low-Carbon Products Lead, CLF
    • Rachelle Habchi, Low-Carbon Products Lead, CLF
    • Jordan Palmeri, Low-Carbon Products Senior Manager, CLF

    CRediT authorship contribution: Writing — original draft: B.W. and R.H.; Formal analysis: R.H. and B.W.; Writing — review and editing: J.P. and B.W.; Methodology: B.W., R.H., and J.P.;  Visualization: B.W.;  Conceptualization: B.W. and J.P.; Project Administration: B.W.

    Citación

    Waldman, B., Habchi, R., and Palmeri, J. (2025). 2025 CLF North American Material Baselines Report. Carbon Leadership Forum.

    Biblioteca de recursos

    Reclaimed and Reused: Recommended LCA Modeling Guidance to Support EPDs for Reused Construction Materials

    Material reuse is one strategy for reducing the embodied carbon of construction. While the preparation of previously used materials for reuse has an environmental impact, it avoids many of the resource extraction and manufacturing impacts of building with newly manufactured products. Given the amount of demolition and deconstruction across North America (and beyond), there is a vast potential for material reuse to expand in scale. However, barriers to material reuse scaling exist.

    DEQ Low Embodied Carbon Housing Program: Roadmap to Success

    Embodied Carbon Pathways to 2050 for the United States, a collaboration between the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), RMI, and the University of Washington (UW) Life Cycle Lab, provides an assessment of embodied carbon from US construction materials and explores pathways to align with a 1.5°C global warming limit.

    International Embodied Carbon Data Availability: A Review of Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) Availability in Europe, China, and Australia

    CLF completed a landscape analysis of product-level embodied carbon data availability in regions outside North America with the goals of: (i) understanding how LCA/EPD data availability varies globally; (ii) informing where targeted initiatives are needed to increase the availability of data; and (iii) determining whether adequate EPD data exists to develop CLF Material Baselines outside North America. This report summarizes our findings and provides initial insights into what data is available to inform low-carbon procurement efforts in Australia, China, and Europe.

    The CLF Benchmark Explorer

    Emissions from the operations of buildings and infrastructure are significant, well-understood contributors to national and global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the contribution of embodied carbon—emissions associated with the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of construction materials across the life cycle of a building or asset—is neglected by comparison. Even at the global level, embodied carbon estimates are typically based on manufacturing emissions from the production of a handful of the highest-impact materials (e.g. concrete, steel, aluminum, and wood).

    Embodied Carbon Pathways to 2050 for the United States

    Embodied Carbon Pathways to 2050 for the United States, a collaboration between the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), RMI, and the University of Washington (UW) Life Cycle Lab, provides an assessment of embodied carbon from US construction materials and explores pathways to align with a 1.5°C global warming limit.

    Washington State Carbon Emissions Estimation: 2025 – 2050

    Emissions from the operations of buildings and infrastructure are significant, well-understood contributors to national and global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the contribution of embodied carbon—emissions associated with the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of construction materials across the life cycle of a building or asset—is neglected by comparison. Even at the global level, embodied carbon estimates are typically based on manufacturing emissions from the production of a handful of the highest-impact materials (e.g. concrete, steel, aluminum, and wood).

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