Executive Director

Alison Kinn Bennett is the Executive Director of Building Transparency, a nonprofit providing the open-access data and tools needed to make embodied carbon visible and actionable for the global construction industry. She leads Building Transparency’s development of EC3 (Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator) — the world’s largest open-access repository of Environmental Product Declarations, with roughly 200,000 EPDs from over 2,000 manufacturers across 85 countries — and the upcoming Open Data for Climate Initiative (ODCi), an effort to fill critical data gaps. Her focus is on elevating embodied carbon as a central climate issue and driving awareness of the power of standards, transparency, and data for more informed decision-making.

Alison brings nearly three decades of experience at the U.S. EPA, where she led efforts in sustainable products and purchasing, cleaner manufacturing, and data-driven climate action, bringing together policy and technical staff across dozens of green building and products programs to advance market-based approaches to environmental protection. Most recently, she led Inflation Reduction Act-funded efforts to develop a methodology for calculating product-level embodied greenhouse gas emissions and to support the construction sector in reporting via EPDs through Buy Clean programs.

She co-chairs ACLCA’s Standards and Requirements Decision-making Committee (SRDC), which governs the ACLCA Product Category Rule Open Standard, and serves on the ISO/Greenhouse Gas Protocol Joint Working Group on product-level carbon accounting.

Alison holds a master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia School of Architecture and dual bachelor’s degrees in Geography and Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She resides in Arlington, Virginia.