Review and Assessment: The Role of Foam Plastic Insulation in Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change

Building systems and materials are being called upon today to provide greater levels of performance in many areas. Resilience is needed to protect against severe weather due to climate change, especially as the population in urban and coastal regions increases. Embodied and operational carbon emissions reductions also are needed to help stop or at least slow down climate change and its expected impacts. Affordability, energy efficiency, labor efficiency, and other concerns cannot be ignored. These challenges require a holistic approach to optimization so that improving one performance metric does not fundamentally harm another, particularly when including carbon emission mitigation as an additional design optimization consideration. A “total carbon” (whole-building life cycle) approach is needed to effectively minimize climate change impacts. This paper assesses the role of foam plastic insulation materials (and insulation materials in general) as a means to optimize building systems for the purpose of climate change mitigation and resilient adaptation. The paper traverses the following topics from a data-driven perspective to better inform design and policy decisions for building decarbonization: (1) building materials and their contributions to global and U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; (2) contribution of insulation embodied carbon to global and U.S. GHG emissions; (3) advancements in foam plastic insulation materials to lower their global warming potential (GWP) and maintain critical performance characteristics; (4) operational emissions savings (carbon payback and carbon avoidance) of building insulation in light of building electrification, a changing power grid, and the importance of building envelope efficiency; and (5) multifunctional applications of foam plastic insulation to optimize building system design, performance, resiliency, resource efficiency, affordability, and total carbon reductions in the construction and operation of buildings.

NOTE: The pdf provided below is an article accepted for publication in The Changing Face of Building Materials and Systems in Response to Climate Change, Copyright © 2026, ASTM International, West Conshohocken, PA, https://doi.org/10.1520/STP165720240037. 

A copy of the final published article is available as part of the Symposium Proceedings or for purchase from the ASTM store. A copy of the presentation slide deck is available under "Supporting Documents."