ClimateTech Solutions, Sustainable Materials, and Circularity

Good materials make good design. Selecting good materials requires balancing cost, performance, installation requirements, and style.

Material science  is interesting in that the more we know, the more we go back in time, pulling from nature and ancient architecture, looking hard at the natural world to see how it has solved the challenges that we currently face. 

Plus, much of building requires sourcing materials from multiple sites around the world. With all of these factors considered, reducing emissions from the production to the deployment of building materials requires stakeholders to adopt a whole life-cycle approach with harmony across multiple sectors and at each stage of a project’s lifecycle. 

Here, we’ll explore some of the history and future of material revelations and advancements in, from carbon-sequestering concrete to phase-change materials and beyond, the role of government regulation and its partnership with private industry.

ClimateTech Timeline

As Chris Magwood, manager at RMI, would tell it, ClimateTech thinking has been a well-established part of conversation for the last 20 years. 

“As someone who was making a living making biobased buildings, we were among an international cohort who was designing and constructing biobased buildings of many different sizes and types and actively sharing our successes and issues with each other,” Magwood says. “There have been strong communities of designers, builders, and owners dedicated to approaches like straw bale, hempcrete, bamboo, cork and earthen buildings, many of which were formed and experienced rapid growth through the 1990s.” 

That small sample of work produced results and provided case studies for future applications. 

“With the straw bale example, there's a clear line between the testing work done in the late 1990s to early 2000s, the adoption of a straw bale code in the United States and several E.U. countries in the 2010s to the proliferation of prefabricated straw panel companies today,” he adds. 

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) began to take root in the late 1990s as the building industry began to recognize its impact on the climate. Advocates for less environmental damage were trying to calculate the carbon footprint of a building by adding up the carbon footprint of all a building’s products. This work led to the first ISO standard (14040), which then led to the LCA guidelines in 2006. 

While home building and construction was behind other industries, practitioners also noticed its outsized impacts and wanted to be more responsible. After LCA guidelines were in place, the Environmental Product Declaration, or EPD, arrived to quantify environmental information about the life cycle of a product. 

The EPD allows specifiers to compare two products that have the same function and is based on the LCA, following the ISO 14040 series of international standards, and must be verified by an independent third-party before publication.

“These two things also had a lot of overlap–a lot of pioneers in biobased building were also pioneers in building LCA, as concern for the climate was a central motivation in both areas,” Magwood said. “And LCA has ended up being a really great way to quantify the climate benefits of biobased building, with the report our RMI team just published standing as a good example of this.”

Biomass Report

RMI’s April 2025 report “Building with Biomass: A New American Harvest” looks at the embodied carbon impact of replacing conventional building products with bio-based products. It uses a life-cycle analysis to quantify the sustainability outcomes, an economic analysis to understand the manufacturing need and impacts, along with a quantity analysis of available biomass material. 

The key findings from the report show that if the construction industry can upcycle biomass into building products, 100 million metric tons of CO2 could be stored profitably in new buildings, even if it is adopted at a low scale. Plus, it would result in nearly $80B in new manufacturing, creating 42,000 new jobs. Finally, it would mean 400M tons of underused biomass from farms, forests and landfills would make its way into healthy, affordable products for housing. 

For the study, 40 single family home models were created in the Building Emissions Accounting for Materials (BEAM) software to perform virtual life-cycle assessments. Using the virtual models, the group discovered that nearly 75% of all the carbon storage potential was from interior products that are protected from the outdoor environment–bio-based products don’t last as long when exposed to moisture and extreme temperatures.

While this discovery presents a challenge to wide adoption, bio-based products can only be used in interior parts of the home and have a huge impact. Plus, the fact that they would be discreetly tucked in the home structure also means that the homeowner wouldn’t need to be educated or convinced. 

“I hope that this report helps the industry understand that biobased materials aren't one trick ponies great for scoring environmental points but making things slower, more expensive and underperforming,” Magwood says. “I am particularly glad to be putting some good cost comparison information out into the industry, showing that in every product category we considered in the study, there is a bio-based product option that is at cost parity with incumbent products.”

EPDs: Getting Traction

Regardless of the type of product being manufactured, more companies are using EPDs to promote a commitment to lowering environmental impacts. Green Builder Media recently polled builders and homeowners through its COGNITION Smart Data platform on EPDs with the following insights. 

More than 80% of builders are specifying products with EPDs as of the report’s publishing in September 2024.  

The results indicate that it will have very rapid adoption–more than half of respondents who are not currently using EPDs to specify products said they would be within the next year, and another 45% said they would be in the next few years. 

Many factors are driving the adoption. This graph below shows that adoption has been influenced by a big range of factors, from consumer demand to regulatory requirements to sustainability goals. 

EPDs are a great way to consistently measure products across the industry, but there also are new innovations entering the marketplace on a regular basis from both startups and global corporations. Practitioners are looking at lots of sources to identify new materials, but mostly rely on news articles and social media to find the next best thing. 

While looking for that next best thing, cost and performance have to come out on top, so every product needs to be a unicorn. In the survey, 40% of the Green Builder audience rated cost as the number one factor in trying a new product, and 31% rated performance as the top priority. 

Live Material Innovation

Many companies are seeing the opportunity to reuse products to cut sourcing costs and to be sustainable. For instance, home builder Netze Homes is reducing carbon emissions by using recycled steel frames from discarded automobiles for the frames of its homes. 

The company claims it can save up to 60 mature trees per home and build a home 20 times stronger than traditional wood framing. The cold-formed steel framing has the added benefit of weather and fire resiliency, plus the homes are designed with other energy-efficient features for a 40% reduction in energy bills. 

Building material manufacturer Modern Mill introduced ACRE, a 100% tree-free, recyclable product made from upcycled rice hulls, as a sustainable replacement for wood in home siding, decking, trim, furniture, and millwork.

The company reports that 20 billion pounds of rice are produced annually in the U.S. and almost half is exported. All the hulls of the 10 billion pounds of rice that stay in this country end up in landfills. 

Modern Mill uses those hulls to manufacture ACRE in a zero-waste manufacturing facility in Mississippi, which is then distributed across the country. ACRE is 50% rice hulls by volume, mixed with a resin that includes PVC for performance and durability, and free of phenol, formaldehydes, adhesives, wood pulp, forever chemicals, and has no VOCs. So, using and handling ACRE doesn’t carry the threat of negative health impacts.

Another leading product is the Interface carpet tile that is carbon negative. The Interface Embodied Beauty Collection is carbon negative when measured from cradle to gate, or from raw materials to manufacturing. The carpet tiles combine with a backing that has bio-based materials that store carbon with specialty yarns and tufting processes.

With more than a quarter of all U.S. homes covered in vinyl, a group of companies looked at how to make it a more sustainable process. The Revinylize Recycling Collaborative is a recycling initiative that includes dedicated installers, recyclers, distributors and landfills, in partnership with the Polymeric Exterior Products Association (PEPA) and verified by GreenCircle Certified. 

The program started after the success of a pilot project in Northeast Ohio that recycled 500,000+ pounds of aftermarket residential vinyl siding from 2021-2023.

More of this type of innovation will take place with the support of venture capital groups like Third Derivative that are accelerating ClimateTech solutions. Looking at the Netherlands-based organization’s portfolio is like seeing the future of advanced materials. 

One such startup is called Excess Materials Exchange, a group that uses AI to understand waste streams, and then can identify a valuable next life for the material. Other startups in the portfolio include Carbon Cell that is developing a carbon-negative, compostable, and high performance expanded foam replacement to expanded polystyrene insulation. 

MOXY has developed an industrial process to mineralize fiber similar to how nature petrifies wood to make a new class of building materials that are low-cost, have low-carbon footprints, can sequester carbon for more than 1,000 years, and can outperform in other capacities. The MOXY material can be used in many applications, from siding to roofing and from I-beams to trim. 

Some innovative products are already reaching scale through big collaborations. The country’s largest builder, DR Horton, partnered with Plantd to accelerate bio-based products using structural panels made from fast-growing grasses to replace OSB and plywood. Plantd is delivering 10 million panels for D.R. Horton and estimates that they will sequester 165,000 metric tons of CO2 and avoid cutting down 1.2 million trees. 

Many startups and longtime manufacturers are currently investing in research and development with new concepts, such as self-healing concrete and mycelium, or fungus, that can be produced in a factory as an insulation product. The self-healing concrete has bacteria spores so that when the concrete cracks and water gets in the cracks, the bacteria spores germinate coming alive and producing calcium carbonate crystals to heal the material. 

The Future is Normal 

It’s good to have goals, and Magwood’s goal is to see both biobased building and LCAs normalized in the industry. 

“I used to think this was a worthy pipe dream, but I'm now thinking it could happen in the next decade or two,” he says. “The two are mutually supportive... The more designers who perform an LCA, the more likely they are to see the huge climate benefits of biobased building.”

Magwood believes that the industry is just at the start of the adoption for both LCA and biobased buildings, with much of the groundwork in place now to make it possible for much wider and faster adoption. He uses the example of Ecococon, a company that developed a modular straw panel system. The company grew from supplying single-family homes to multi-family developments to schools and now to two very large projects, a high-rise apartment building and huge warehouse/logistics center. 

Magwood sees similar product types following the same upward curve. Our investment and support will be critical to get the most innovative products past regulation and to the scale needed to become a regular part of home design. 

Publisher’s Note: Green Builder's 20th Anniversary celebration is sponsored by: Carrier, Trex, and Mohawk.