FY 2023 - FY 2024 Pollution Prevention Grants: Environmental Justice Through Safer and More Sustainable Products

This grant opportunity is announced under the authority of the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 and is funded by IIJA. EPA is announcing a two-year competitive funding opportunity for awards to eligible entities, including: the fifty states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, any territory or possession of the U.S., any agency or instrumentality of a state or tribe, including colleges and universities, and federally recognized tribes and intertribal consortia. Applicants are strongly encouraged, but not required, to develop partnerships where they can strengthen their ability to provide P2 technical assistance to businesses in disadvantaged communities, which are communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution.

The goal of this grant opportunity is to address environmental justice by providing P2 technical assistance to businesses (e.g., information, training, expert advice) to improve human health and the environment in disadvantaged communities by increasing the supply, demand and use of safer and more sustainable products, such as those that are certified by EPA's Safer Choice Program, or those that conform to EPA's Recommendations for Specifications, Standards and Ecolabels for Federal Purchasing (EPA Recommendations). Greater availability and use of safer and sustainable products can decrease harmful chemical exposures and impacts on human health and the environment in disadvantaged communities. Therefore, EPA views these grants as a component of the Biden Administration Justice40 Initiative, which is designed to assure that 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities.

To allow a greater number of disadvantaged communities to benefit from the results and lessons learned from projects funded by these grants, EPA is requiring recipients to develop P2 case studies on approaches to make safer and sustainable products more available in disadvantaged communities where the approaches are new, not widely known or adopted, or where the recipient believes detailed information on the project could support more widespread project replication. Recipients must develop at least one case study during the grant period. Case studies submitted by recipients will be used to build and share a body of knowledge about P2 approaches to make safer and sustainable products more available in disadvantaged communities that could be implemented by other enterprises. In addition to case studies, EPA also encourages other means to document and widely share projects and lessons learned through the technical assistance provided through these grants (e.g., outreach, training, and videos). Guidance for developing these case studies can be found in Appendix B.