The Environmental Protection Agency's mission is to protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment—air, water, and land—upon which life depends. Since its founding in 1970, EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people.

Building-Related Programs

Brownfields Program

EPA’s Brownfields Program provides grants and technical assistance to communities, states, tribes and others to assess, safely clean up and sustainably reuse these contaminated properties. Cleaning up and reinvesting in brownfields protects human health and the environment, reduces blight, and takes development pressures off green spaces and working lands.

Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines (CPG) Program

The Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines (CPG) program is part of EPA's continuing effort to promote the use of materials recovered from solid waste. Buying recycled-content products ensures that the materials collected in recycling programs will be used again in the manufacture of new products. The CPG program is authorized by Congress under Section 6002 of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and Executive Order 13423. EPA is required to designate products that are or can be made with recovered materials, and to recommend practices for buying these products. Once a product is designated, procuring agencies are required to purchase it with the highest recovered material content level practicable.

A key component of the CPG program is EPA's list of designated products and the accompanying recommendations for post-consumer content and recovered materials content. EPA has developed criteria and a process for product designation. EPA published final or proposed recycled-content recommendations for each product. All proposals, designations, and recommendations are published in the Federal Register.

ENERGY STAR

The ENERGY STAR program partners with product manufacturers, building owners and operators, homebuilders, and many other organizations to improve the energy efficiency of products, buildings and homes. Through its partnerships with 16,000 private and public sector organizations, ENERGY STAR delivers the technical information and tools that organizations and consumers need to choose energy-efficient solutions and best management practices.

Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program

EPA's Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program helps federal agencies identify and use private sector standards and ecolabels to procure products and services with improved environmental performance and financial benefits over their lifecycle – from extraction through manufacturing and eventual recycling/reuse/disposal.

Green Power Partnership

The Green Power Partnership provides information about renewable power sources, benefits of using them, and how to participate in the Partnership.

Greening EPA

EPA Office of Administration's (OA) mission is to provide management, infrastructure, and operations support to EPA's approximately 150 offices and laboratories nationwide. EPA implements a range of strategies to reduce the environmental impact of our facilities and operations, from building new, high-performance structures to improving the energy and water conservation of existing buildings.

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)

EPA's Indoor Air Quality Division conducts numerous research and educational projects to improve indoor air quality and other elements of the indoor environment.

Sustainable Management of Construction and Demolition Materials

Construction and Demolition (C&D) materials consist of the debris generated during the construction, renovation and demolition of buildings, roads, and bridges. EPA promotes a Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) approach that identifies certain C&D materials as commodities that can be used in new building projects, thus avoiding the need to mine and process virgin materials.

WaterSense

WaterSense has developed WaterSense at Work, a compilation of water-efficiency best management practices, to help commercial and institutional facilities understand and better manage their water use, help facilities establish an effective water management program and identify projects and practices that can reduce facility water use.