by Lauren Breckenridge, LEED AP
Sustainability Associate at Green Badger
This year’s Advancing Construction Decarbonization conference had one theme running underneath nearly every session, whether the topic was Scope 3 reporting, LEED v5, or waste diversion: decarbonization only works if you can prove it.
Teams have ambitious targets, but the numbers to back them up are scattered across spreadsheets, subcontractor emails, and PDFs nobody has time to dig through. That’s the gap Green Badger’s software closes, turning scattered paperwork into concrete data (no pun intended, though after two days of concrete truck anecdotes, maybe a little) that teams can act on while a project is still underway, not after it’s too late to change anything.
The paperwork problem hasn’t gone away; it has just gotten smarter.
Amanda Atkinson from Holder Construction opened Day 1 by breaking down Scope 3 data collection into what trades need to report and why. That thread ran through John Hyde’s session on structuring project data for corporate emissions reporting and the AI-powered carbon and utility spend panel, where Ryan Companies, PCL, and Webcor argued that agentic AI can remove the manual grind of processing invoices and fuel data. Erin Kirkpatrick’s EPD and LCA session showed why the underlying data matters: Swinerton’s mass timber EPD took years to build, based on datasets tracing wood from industrial clearcutting to single-tree-selection harvests run by Indigenous Nations. An EPD number is only as good as what’s underneath it.
Speaking of proof, our own Head of Sustainable Construction Solutions, Kristin Brubaker, opened “From EPDs to Action” with an image everyone in that room carries around: a concrete truck rolling through the gate at 6 a.m. That truck delivers roughly ten cubic yards of concrete and two to four tons of carbon dioxide already released before it ever leaves the plant, permanently, the moment the pour finishes. Multiply that by every truck, every pour, every project represented at ACD, and that room collectively influences more embodied carbon this year than some entire countries emit.
Kristin’s point wasn’t doom. For the first time, we can see that number while the trucks are still rolling, not eight months later in a consultant’s report. She named the two gaps that quietly sink good projects run by good people:
- a data gap (most teams can’t answer “what’s our actual embodied carbon number, right now?”), and
- a preparedness gap (that question usually lands on whoever’s newest on the team, with no tools and no time).
Her fix: carbon needs the same discipline construction already gives cost—baselined at kickoff, tracked as it’s bought, reported monthly, and forecast to completion. Then she showed it live in Green Badger 2.0, where the entire EC3 and HPD databases now reside on the same platform teams use for LEED. A project engineer can see a product’s carbon impact color-coded against the baseline before it’s purchased. Fittingly, USGBC California just named Green Badger the preferred technology provider for the Contractor’s Commitment. She asks the room to pick one project, set a 30-day deadline, turn on tracking, and let the owner watch the number move in real time.
Ambition is easy. Delivery is the hard part.
That tension ran through both days, and Stephanie Gowing’s session made the case concrete, literally. Absher’s energy study found a job trailer’s diesel generator was running at just 25% load, wildly oversized for actual demand. Pairing it with battery storage could cut generator runtime by 87.5% and save an estimated $4,561 per month at that site. That’s the kind of number that turns a values statement into a budget line.
It’s exactly the measurable action the Contractor’s Commitment is built around: five categories (carbon, wellness, waste, water, materials), each with Good/Better/Best tiers, applied to at least 30% of a signatory’s annual revenue and reported yearly. Nearly twenty contractors have signed on. Kate Callahan (GBI) tied that investment to ROI and resilience, and Tiffany King walked through what California’s CALGreen and SB 253/261 require on the ground, a preview of where the rest of the country is headed. The “Bridging Owner Ambitions” panel highlighted the tension: owners want the target, contractors have to hit it with fossil-fuel-dependent equipment and limited material options. Tabitha Scott’s data center session showed this tension sharpening month by month, with more than half of U.S. states considering moratoriums on data center construction. Ronald Holmes closed the loop at the field level: none of it works unless crews actually buy in.
If there’s one note to leave you with, it’s that decarbonization is quietly moving from ambition to requirement, whether or not every session said so out loud. LEED v5 makes embodied carbon assessment a prerequisite rather than an optional credit. California already requires EPDs for structural steel, flat glass, and mineral wool for public works; New York set strength-based carbon limits for concrete back in January 2025; Minnesota’s Buy Clean Buy Fair law takes effect this year. Voluntary frameworks like the Contractor’s Commitment are, in a real sense, a head start on requirements already arriving state by state. Teams that treat this as a deadline to sweat over later will lose the sprint. Teams that build the measurement habit now, as Absher and Swinerton already have, will have done the hard part by the time it’s no longer optional.
