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Roadblock Rebates to help make EPDs more accessible

This content originally published in the Winter 2024 print edition of NAPA Quarterly. Subscribe here.

NAPA selected to help make EPDs more affordable, accessible

By Ty Johnson

the road

Increased access to Emerald Eco-Label tool part of $160 million EPA effort to measure and ultimately reduce emissions.

TAXPAYERS ARE GROWING EVER more cognizant of how government spending connects to their quality of life in this increasingly digitized world.

In a way, this is how it’s always been: Municipalities are expected to be good stewards of public money while also serving the community, but members of the public aren’t only concerned with tax levies these days. In towns and counties across the country, residents are asking their elected officials for transparency, especially as it relates to the environment.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a $10 million grant for NAPA to help those municipalities find answers, at least when it comes to their roadways. The funding will help launch the next phase of work central to NAPA’s Emerald Eco-Label tool, which so far has published hundreds of environmental product declarations (EPDs) showing how different factors in asphalt pavement production can impact greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

epa deputy administrator

GOING EMERALD

NAPA launched its EPD tool in 2017 as the first requests for environmental impact data on asphalt pavement mixes were trickling in from the private industry and a handful of municipalities. Often compared to the nutrition labels on food packages, the Emerald Eco-Labelpublished EPDs offer insight into how a product’s production, transportation, and placement affect its net carbon emission contributions.

Working in partnership with five universities and two asphalt mix producers, NAPA’s grant charges it to make EPDs “more robust and widely available” and to establish a Product Category Rule (PCR) standard for flexible pavements over the next five years.

As the calls for across-the-board product transparency grew, NAPA’s role shifted to educating contractors about how the tool could help spot energy inefficiencies impacting the bottom line. When the first federal projects began asking for “environmentally preferable” asphalt, like at the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Lukeville, Arizona Port of Entry, EPDs provided a guide for establishing what that language meant.

While hundreds of plants have already published hundreds of EPDs using the Emerald Eco-Label tool, the EPA is empowering NAPA to take its EPD program to a new level, with much of the funding devoted to making EPD knowledge more accessible across the asphalt pavement industry.

GREEN GRANTED

NAPA events in recent years have included sessions aimed at increasing awareness of how the Emerald Eco-Label tool and its Optimizer function can allow for users to toggle settings and test how different factors impact the GHG bottom line of a mix. Besides sharing the latest features, the goal was to grow the tool’s usage.

NAPA members have participated in data-gathering for benchmarking surveys, which ran parallel to the Emerald program’s publishing process. There was a premium on having this data to mollify federal agencies intent on establishing standards, and NAPA succeeded in making the case that a one-size-fits-all approach would not suffice for an industry where local geology and regional geography can lead to vastly different GHG values for similar mixes.

NAPA’s share of the $160 million in EPA funding announced at Superior Paving’s Chantilly, Virginia plant in July will go toward helping asphalt pavement mix producers develop EPDs through investments in data and tools. An additional 38 grantees received funds to standardize and expand the market for construction products with lower greenhouse gas emissions in more than a dozen other new and reused construction material categories. With enough data, the EPA projects it will be able to plot environmental impacts across the life of a product and catalyze more sustainable purchasing decisions.

Working in partnership with five universities and two asphalt mix producers, NAPA’s grant charges it to make EPDs “more robust and widely available” and to establish a Product Category Rule (PCR) standard for flexible pavements over the next five years.

NAPA is also a subgrantee on a second EPA grant that will create a National Center for Sustainable Construction Materials at Oklahoma State University. OSU’s College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology will partner with 10 other universities and NAPA to promote lowcarbon construction materials usage. The five-year, $10 million grant is the largest the OSU School of Civil and Environmental Engineering has received in more than 10 years.

FUTURE-PROOFING THE INDUSTRY

stockpiles of reclaimed

While the grant has explicitly stated goals for the program as a whole, there are many indirect implications for the growth of EPDs in the asphalt pavement industry, including through establishing best practices for minimizing energy waste. Those low-hanging fruits, like paving under stockpiles to reduce the need to burn off moisture in the drum, factor into another forward-looking program through a NAPA/EPA partnership: the ENERGY STAR Asphalt Plant Energy Performance Peer Exchange (APEX). Members of the network meet periodically to share tips and tricks for reducing energy usage and increasing bottom lines at asphalt mix plants across the country.

Creation and growth of the APEX program led to NAPA being named an ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year in 2023 and 2024, but the real goal for the trade association is to safeguard the longevity of the asphalt pavement industry, especially when there are federal agencies willing to heed guidance from the industry.

Supply chain issues in recent memory underscore just how hard it is to predict what the construction materials market could look like in another five years, but NAPA and the industry are at least equipped to help lead federal procurement in the right direction.

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