BFRW committee hears widespread stakeholder concern about embodied carbon appendix; committee sets comment deadline

The State Building Code Council's BFRW committee held an extended debate on a proposed "embodied carbon" appendix on June 13, receiving written and oral comments from trade groups, climate advocates, design professionals and legislators. The committee did not vote to adopt the appendix; instead members set a written-comment deadline and agreed to continue technical review at future meetings.

Committee chair Roger Haringa read a process statement that set a 5 p.m. June 23 deadline for written public comments and outlined the committee's schedule for handling submissions. "Moving forward, all comments on this proposal must be sent to the SBC staff in writing and submitted prior to 5PM on June 23," Haringa read from the posted notice. The committee will consider comments at upcoming BFRW sessions (June 27, July 2 and July 18) and return recommended language to the full council by July 18.

What the proposal does and why people objected - Proposal scope: The posted draft proposes an appendix offering three compliance pathways: a product-based (material/product) prescriptive pathway, a whole-building life-cycle assessment (LCA) performance pathway, and a building-reuse pathway. The appendix would allow jurisdictions that opt in by local ordinance to apply the appendix to large projects (draft language referenced thresholds such as 50,000 or 100,000 square feet; exact threshold varies among submitted versions). - Industry objections: Multiple trade groups and material producers said they had…