Green Procurement and Purchasing

Implementing Green Procurement and Purchasing

In order to implement GPP policies, countries have been applying a number of different strategies and types of instruments. GPP policies have the power to correct institutional deficits and improve performance, leading to lower purchasing costs and higher environmental quality that improves government's overall efficiency and impact a broad range of environmental issues, according to the OECD. These instruments depend on the nature of the goods and services concerned, and the environmental impacts that are to be mitigated through the GPP strategy.

These practices can vary widely, and can either be voluntary or mandatory in nature. But many countries currently require that purchasing guidelines of particular products contain a minimum amount of recycled content or achieve specific levels of energy. Increasingly, these guidelines are promoting the use of biobased or organic products, biofuels, clean sources of energy, water conservation, and incorporate fewer polluting technologies, especially in developed countries.

Based on a review of these instruments, the OECD states that they usually include:

• information-based tools to provide environment-related information to procurement officers and agencies: catalogues, environmental criteria, databases, questionnaires, and life-cycle assessment methodologies;
• training and communication tools to increase awareness among procurement officers and agencies: courses for procurement officers, networks, conferences, websites, and newsletters;
• accounting and financial tools to better reflect environmental characteristics of products when choosing between goods and services: life-cycle costing or value-for-money methodologies and spreadsheets, third-party financing, methodologies to quantify external costs, price preferences; and
• standards and directives introducing performance-based or technology-based in goods and services: minimum recycled content or energy-efficiency standards.

GPP is not a stand-alone policy tool, and is considered a complement to other policies. They can also affect and be affected by other environmental policies that are already in [Page 239]place. This is particularly important if one considers that environmental policy objectives will affect operations that fall within the responsibility of other administrations. Therefore, there is the need for policies and strategies aimed at integrating agencies and departments by modifying their competences and institutional missions. This means that various government organizations responsible for the implementation of different policy objectives must internalize environmental priorities, and that environmental authorities must ensure maximum efforts and assistance to facilitate the implementation of environmental management and environmental procurement initiatives.

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