You've heard of a building that has good bones.

Well, what about one that has green bones?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes. More than a third of the world's greenhouse gases come from buildings.

Most of that is what's called operational carbon, running the air conditioning, keeping the lights on, that kind of thing.

The rest is what's called embodied carbon.

These are emissions created while building the building.

A couple years ago, California became the first state to regulate embodied carbon in its building code.

And starting this year, all non-residential buildings in the state, over 50,000 square feet, have to adhere to that code.

Marketplaces Kaylee Wells has more.

Drew Shula is touring a new school he helped build just outside of Los Angeles.

It's a modern lattice of metal and concrete equipped with solar panels and EV chargers.

And we're here on site at the beautiful Malibu High School project that just had its ribbon

cutting about six months ago.

Shula founded the sustainability consulting firm Vertical Group.

His team helped make sure the building materials complied with sustainability requirements,

including the roof, floor, steel, walls, paint, and insulation.

All I do is green building work.

And we were really only looking at operational carbon and almost totally ignoring

embodied carbon until just a few years ago. Shula says the new California requirements aren't hard to

meet. Builders just haven't had to think about them before. We are slow moving. We like

repetition. We like to do the same projects over and over because it saves money, it becomes

...