LowEmissionAsphalt-136pg-WhitePaper-May2023

P a g e | 100 Environmental Justice The paving industry has a big advantage when it comes to environmental justice (EJ) . To the extent our industry embraces the great opportunity we have if we focus on use phase emissions from the road systems we build and maintain, one can quickly conclude that pavements are everywhere, including a dominant part of the land use in “at risk” communities. Our major highways converge at or near dense urban neighborhoods. Many airports are surrounded by lower income communities. Our largest parking structures tend to be downtown . To best address this, a short excerpt from the [Elon] Musk Found ation’s XPRIZE Carbon Removal Prize research team may best lay out this tailored-made opportunity for the paving industry: Alongside emissions reductions, carbon removal is essential for meeting climate goals. To ensure the field can grow to and maintain gigaton scale, solutions developers must prioritize environmental justice. Without EJ front and center, the industry risks marginalizing, or further marginalizing, communities and reproducing harms of the past. In the past, companies around the world and across different industries have sidelined communities, leaving them without a voice in key decisions about a project’s siting and overall direction. In the case of disadvantaged communities, including Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color as well as low-income communities, this disenfranchisement has often occurred in tandem with industries’ willful neglect of the environment, resulting in public health disasters and widespread environmental contamination that create “sacrifice zones.” Given these past experiences and the subsequent erosion of trust, some communities and EJ advocates are understandably wary of the carbon removal industry. They fear that CDR will merely perpetuate cycles of disinvestment and disenfranchisement and deepen inequalities. But carbon removal’s nascency means there is still time to shape the direction of this emerging field and grow the industry in ways that address environmental justice issues head on. By placing EJ at the center of their business plans, carbon removal companies can demonstrate their commitment to learning from past injustices and set themselves on a path to scale sustainably and with societal support. From a business strategy perspective, this means seeing EJ not merely as a “nice to have”