By Kristin Brubaker
Head of Sustainable Construction Services
At 6:04 a.m. on a Tuesday, the first concrete truck of the day rolls through a jobsite gate. That one truck carries about 10 cubic yards of concrete and, along with it, roughly 2 to 4 tons of carbon dioxide that were released before the truck ever left the plant. Multiply that by every truck, every pour, and every project running today, and the scale of the problem becomes clear. It also explains why LEED v5 embodied carbon requirements are about to change the way construction teams plan, buy, and build. For the first time, project teams can see the carbon number while there is still time to act on it, rather than learning it months later at closeout.
This shift is not just a certification update. It reflects a broader, urgent reality: the construction industry has enormous influence over global emissions, and the tools to manage that influence responsibly are finally catching up to the requirements. That idea recently anchored my presentation at the 2026 Advancing Construction Decarbonization conference, where sustainability and construction professionals heard exactly why this shift matters right now.
Why Embodied Carbon Cannot Wait
The numbers behind this urgency are hard to ignore. Buildings and construction account for roughly 37 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions. If global concrete production were its own country, it would rank as the third largest emitter on Earth, behind only China and the United States.
Most of a typical building’s upfront embodied carbon (often 50 to 75 percent) sits in the structure and foundation. That carbon is shaped during design, locked in during procurement, and released the moment concrete is poured or steel is erected. There is no carbon-positive retrofit for a pour that already happened. Meanwhile, global floor area is on track to double by 2060, meaning the industry will add the equivalent of a New York City to the planet every month for the next forty years.
This is exactly why LEED v5 embodied carbon requirements exist. An industry responsible for over a third of global emissions also holds a third of the solution, and the leverage available to project teams right now is enormous, if teams have the data to act on it.
The Wall of Requirements: Buy Clean, State Laws, and LEED v5
Owners are already pushing carbon accountability down onto construction teams. Carbon language is showing up in RFPs and contracts, not as an aspiration, but as a deliverable. Healthcare systems, universities, tech companies, and other industries treat jobsite carbon data as part of their own environmental, social, and governance reporting.
Policy has caught up too. Buy Clean programs are no longer on the horizon; they are here. The federal government sets global warming potential limits for concrete, steel, glass, and asphalt used in federal projects. California requires environmental product declarations, commonly called EPDs, for structural steel, flat glass, and mineral wool. New York set strength-based limits on concrete for state work back in January 2025, and Colorado and Minnesota have their own Buy Clean programs in effect. For any team pursuing public work in these states, an EPD is now a submittal requirement.
Then there is LEED v5. USGBC extended the transition by a full year, pushing the date when version 4 closes to new registrations to June 30, 2027. Every project registered on or after July 1, 2027, will be a LEED v5 project, and the change is significant. Under the new LEED v5 prerequisite, embodied carbon assessment is no longer optional. Every project must quantify cradle-to-gate emissions for structure, enclosure, and hardscape, and identify its carbon hotspots simply to qualify for certification. Points beyond that prerequisite come from measured performance against a baseline, not paperwork alone.
The good news is that teams already running a solid LEED v4 program, one that collects EPDs at submittal and tracks low-emitting materials, already have most of the muscle that the LEED v5 prerequisite requires and that LEED v5 embodied carbon compliance depends on. What changes is scope and timing, not the fundamentals.
The Two Gaps That Sink Good Projects
Even well-intentioned teams struggle with these requirements for two reasons.
The first is a data gap. Ask any project team what their current embodied carbon number is—not the design estimate from eighteen months ago, but the actual figure based on what is being delivered to the site today. Most teams cannot answer that question. The real number usually shows up at closeout, when there is nothing left to decide, and it is often built on industry-average EPDs standing in for product-specific ones, mix designs that have changed since the original calculation, and substitutions nobody rechecked.
The second is a preparedness gap. Sustainability responsibilities often land on a project engineer who is already handling submittals and requests for information, with little training and even less time. When the requirements are not tracked in real time, the result is a scramble near the end of the project: frantic emails to subcontractors who demobilized months earlier, and chasing down sustainability documentation for products installed long ago. That scramble can cost a certification, an owner relationship, and the contract dollars tied to both.
Together, these two gaps explain why projects that fully intend to meet their carbon requirements sometimes fail to. The problem is rarely a lack of care. It is a lack of infrastructure.
Treating Carbon Like Cost: A Workflow for LEED v5 Embodied Carbon Compliance
Construction solved a similar problem with cost a century ago. Estimates, buyout tracking, monthly cost reports, and forecasts turned cost from a surprise discovered at the end of a project into a number managed from day one. Embodied carbon requires the same discipline: baselined at kickoff, tracked as materials are purchased and delivered, reported to the owner monthly, and forecast through completion.
This is where sustainability documentation software has caught up to the requirements. Green Badger’s platform integrates with Building Transparency’s EC3 database and the HPD Public Repository, giving teams access to more than 125,000 verified, product-specific EPDs and HPDs directly inside their existing workflow. Every product search shows its contribution to LEED certification, its place in the Common Materials Framework, and its global warming potential relative to the baseline for that product type, color-coded so that a project engineer does not need a carbon science background to make a smart call.
That EC3 integration also lets teams compare products side by side during value engineering, save vetted products to a permanent library for future projects, and upload formal life cycle assessments for automatic comparison against LEED v5 reduction pathways. Because the EC3 integration draws on more than 125,000 verified records, project engineers spend their time reviewing decisions rather than chasing paperwork. USGBC California has already named Green Badger a preferred software partner for its Contractor’s Commitment, tracking carbon, materials, wellness, water, and waste in one place. The result is a workflow where the data gap and the preparedness gap stop being facts of life and become solved problems.
Get Ready Before the Deadline Arrives
The transition to LEED v5 embodied carbon requirements is not a reason to redesign an entire sustainability program. It is a reason to start now, while there is still runway. This message was at the center of a recent keynote delivered at the Advancing Construction Decarbonization conference, where the case for early preparation was clear: teams that baseline their carbon data today will find the shift to LEED v5 manageable, while teams that wait will face the same month-twenty-two scramble that has always plagued sustainability compliance.
Pick one active project. Baseline its embodied carbon number, turn on tracking for the materials being bought and delivered, and let your owner see that number update in real time. Thirty days from now, you will have real data instead of a guess, and a head start on LEED v5 embodied carbon compliance that most of the industry has not started yet. The tools exist. The requirements are not going away. The only question left is when your team decides to start.
