The China Building Materials Federation convened a Seminar on Green Procurement of Low-Carbon Concrete in Beijing on 22 September 2026, with support from the Energy Foundation. More than sixty people attended, from government, international organisations, research institutes, industry associations, construction firms and materials producers.
Martin Röck spoke on environmental data, low-carbon development and sustainable built environments - on what it takes to get from an embodied carbon target to an actual material choice on an actual project.
The argument of the day
Liu Jianhua, Resident Vice President of the CBMF, framed procurement as “an important bridge connecting technological innovation with market demand” - the point being that market mechanisms and application demand, not laboratory progress, are what decide whether green transformation happens.
Yu Xia of the Energy Foundation was blunt about what stands in the way: low-carbon concrete still faces unresolved problems in standards, in engineering use, in how the market perceives it, and in cost.
Liang Yang of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development gave the keynote on China’s green building materials procurement policy and what it has achieved in government projects so far, arguing for tighter control across the whole process and for widening the policy’s scope. Sol Reeve of UNIDO set international public procurement alongside it as a driver of low-carbon materials markets, and Dr Xia Jingliang of CABR Technology covered the design, standards and applications of low-carbon concrete, including the technical obstacles and what gets past them.
The panel - Stephen Hamil of HUBEXO, Jiang Kefu of Zhejiang Sanshi South New Materials, Xu Tao of China IPPR and the China Institute of Building Standard Design & Research, Zhang Aimin of China Construction Eighth Engineering Division, and Li Wei of the Rocky Mountain Institute - worked through procurement practice, standards, engineering application and how to coordinate a supply chain that currently has no reason to move first.
What was agreed
Green procurement was treated as two things at once: a policy tool for expanding demand, and a mechanism for getting upstream and downstream industry to act together. The concrete next steps named were adding low-carbon indicators, carbon footprints and environmental information into construction procurement evaluation; improving low-carbon concrete standards and disclosure; and aligning domestic environmental information rules with international ones.
That last point is where this connects to our own work. Procurement is one of the few levers that moves a material market rather than a single project - but a limit value only bites if someone is buying against it, and a carbon footprint only travels across a border if the two sides count it the same way.
This work is part of the GBDI China and India Cooperation Incubator, which extends the global building data work into the two markets that will add the most floor area this century.
Source: China Building Materials Federation, 23 September 2026.