by Kristin Brubaker
Head of Sustainable Construction Solutions

What is a materiality assessment?

A materiality assessment is a process for identifying and ranking the ESG topics that are most important to your company and its stakeholders. Instead of tackling every possible sustainability issue, you focus on those that have the greatest impact on your projects and bottom line.

In construction, these issues often include carbon and energy use, job site safety, waste management, water use, community impact, and fair labor practices. When you complete a materiality assessment, you end up with a short list of “material topics” that should guide your policies, project plans, and reporting.

Why materiality matters for ESG in construction

If you are a GC just starting with ESG, it is tempting to grab a big checklist from the internet and try to do everything at once. A materiality assessment keeps you from spreading your team too thin by highlighting what will truly move the needle for your company.

Focusing on material issues helps you: build trust with owners and investors, stay ahead of regulations, win work with ESG-minded clients, and improve project performance over time. For example, if your assessment shows that carbon emissions, waste, and safety are top issues, you can target those topics in bids, jobsite plans, and annual ESG reports.

Key ESG concepts

Before you run a materiality assessment, it helps to know a few basic ESG terms.

• Environmental (E): How your projects affect air, water, land, and climate, like fuel use, electricity on site, water use, materials, waste, and embodied carbon.
• Social (S): How you treat people, including workers, subcontractors, and the local community, such as safety, fair wages, DEI, and community disruption.
• Governance (G): How your company is managed, including ethics, compliance, anti-corruption, and how you handle ESG responsibilities.

You may also hear “double materiality.” That means you look at ESG from two angles: how ESG issues affect your business (e.g., fuel costs or safety claims) and how your business affects people and the environment (e.g., emissions or community disruption).

Step-by-step: How a GC can run a basic materiality assessment

You do not need to be a sustainability expert to start. Here is a simple, construction-friendly process based on industry guidance.

1. Define your scope and goals

Decide what you are assessing: your whole company, a region, or one large project. Set a clear goal, such as “identify the top 5 ESG issues for our firm over the next 3 years” or “understand ESG priorities for our healthcare portfolio.”

This step keeps the assessment realistic and aligned with your business strategy, rather than turning into a side project no one uses.

2. List potential ESG topics

Create a starter list of ESG issues that could matter to your firm, drawing from construction-specific examples. Common topics for general contractors include:

• Carbon emissions and energy use (fuel for equipment, jobsite power, refrigerants).
• Construction waste and recycling.
• Water use and runoff on site.
• Health and safety (TRIR, near-misses, PPE compliance).
• Labor practices and workforce diversity.
• Community impacts like noise, dust, traffic, and local hiring.
• Supply chain issues, such as responsible sourcing and supplier safety.

Do not worry about getting the list perfect; you will narrow it down later.

3. Map your stakeholders

Stakeholders are the people who care about how you build and how you manage ESG. For a GC, this usually includes:

• Owners and developers.
• Employees and company leadership.
• Subcontractors, suppliers, and business partners.
• Local communities and authorities.
• Lenders, insurers, or investors, when relevant.

Write down which stakeholder groups matter most to your business today and which may become more important as ESG requirements grow.

4. Ask stakeholders what matters

Next, gather input from these groups to ensure the assessment reflects real-world priorities, not just leadership opinions. You can keep this simple.

• Short surveys ranking ESG topics from “low” to “high” importance.
• Quick interviews with key stakeholders.
• A workshop with safety, operations, and preconstruction leaders to rate each topic.

The goal is to understand which issues stakeholders want you to focus on first and where they would like to see better data and performance.

5. Rate each issue for impact on your business

Now look at ESG topics from your company’s point of view. For each issue, ask:

• How big is the impact on cost, schedule, risk, or reputation?
• How likely is it to affect us in the next few years?
• Are there upcoming regulations or owner requirements tied to it?

For example, carbon and energy use might rank high because more owners are requesting emissions data, and climate-related requirements are increasing. Safety is always a top priority because it affects insurance, worker retention, and client trust.

6. Create a simple materiality matrix

Many companies use a “materiality matrix” to present their results on a single page. On one axis, you plot “importance to stakeholders,” and on the other, you plot “impact on our business.”

Issues that land in the top-right corner are your most material topics and should drive your ESG goals, metrics, and reporting. You do not need fancy software to start—an Excel chart or slide is enough for an early-stage program.

7. Turn priorities into action and metrics

A materiality assessment only helps if you use it to guide what you do next. Take your top topics and decide:

• What targets will you set (for example, reduce jobsite emissions by a set percentage, increase recycling rate, or improve safety leading indicators)?
• Which metrics will you track for each topic?
• Who owns each metric, and how often will you review progress?

For carbon and energy, this may include tracking Scope 1 fuel use, Scope 2 electricity, and key Scope 3 categories such as product transport, commuting, and business travel. For waste, it may be tons of waste per square foot and diversion rate; for social topics, it could be recordable incident rate, training hours, or local hire percentages.

Common ESG materiality mistakes GCs can avoid

Contractors often hit the same roadblocks when they start ESG materiality work. Here are a few to avoid:

• Trying to cover every ESG topic at once instead of focusing on the top issues.
• Skipping stakeholder input and making it an internal-only paper exercise.
• Forgetting about data and choosing priorities, but never implementing tracking.
• Treating the assessment as “one and done” instead of revisiting it every few years as the business and regulations change.

If you keep the process simple, involve the right people, and tie it to real metrics, your materiality assessment will stay useful rather than sit on a shelf.

How Green Badger supports ESG materiality for GCs

Once you know which ESG topics are material, the next challenge is tracking them consistently and in a job-ready format. That is where Green Badger comes in for general contractors.

Green Badger’s ESG platform is built for construction and lets you track carbon, energy, water, waste, workforce, and other project ESG metrics in one dashboard, without needing to be a carbon accountant. You can capture Scope 1 and 2 emissions from fuel and jobsite power, as well as key Scope 3 categories such as deliveries, commuting, business travel, and embodied carbon, using trusted emission factors.

Because all of your data is centralized, it becomes much easier to report on your material topics across multiple projects and show owners and investors clear, consistent ESG results. That means your materiality assessment does not just identify what matters; paired with Green Badger, it turns into real numbers, trend lines, and proof that your ESG program is moving in the right direction.