Introduction

GREEN PROCUREMENT TOOLBOX -  An on-line guide for professionals.

Buying greener products is easy when you get the fundamentals right. These fundamentals are however sometime daunting for the new practitioner. This page explains some good methodological approaches to delivering a good environmental outcome from procurement.

Two primary tools are introduced here.

1. The Good Environmental Choice Environmental Declaration Standards are made available allowing procurement officers to specify environmental loads of product groups from a life cycle perspective.

2. A simple methodological approach is outlined providing a series of questions to prompt a procurement direction for smaller purchasing decisions.

Finally, the product life cycle approach to Green Procurement is introduced.

Using the register of environmental performance standards

These standards stipulate primary quantifiable environmental performance characteristics of a range of product groups. The standards have been developed in conformance to ISO 14 024 for the purpose of delivering a set of environmental performance requirements that  leading products on the market should be able to meet in Australia.

The environmental performance information can be used as the basis of environmental performance requirements in " Request for Tender" (RFT) documents  by procurement officers. A life cycle approach to environmental performance is generally the preferred approach to stipulating the actual environmental performance required.  Good environmental performance should be incorporated in the overall assessment of " VALUE FOR MONEY" delivering a products with all the required performance characteristics but lowering the environmental damage from it's use.

The voluntary environmental labelling standards are developed and approved by the Management Committee of the Australian Environmental Labelling Association and the stakeholder council after a widespread consultation process. These standards are the core performance benchmarks that products are verified against for compliance in order to receive the Good Environmental Choice Mark. 

To find out more about a product life cycle approach to green procurement read on.

Good Environmental Choice Declaration
Environmental Performance Requirements  

To view the standards click here .

To review how these standards were developed please visit the standard development page here .  

Please Note : The ecolabelling program seeks to cover a broad range of environmental products. If your product group does not have a voluntary environmental labelling standard available at this time we would be interested to assess the opportunity to develop a standard for your particular product group.

Specifying Greener Products

The primary purpose of a green procurement program is to implement approaches to purchasing products which have a lower impact on the environment over their life cycle. A generic approach may be useful when confronted with a particular product that is required but you do not have established environmental performance criteria for.

Below is a generic template that breaks down a simple approach to specifying and choosing between products on the basis of environmental performance. The template outlines relevant questions than can be asked of manufacturers.  The weighting factors are an indication only and will vary between product types. It is impossible to provide a generic weighting factor across diverse product groups. Hence you should exercise some caution in the below weighting factors.

 

GENERIC GREEN PROCUREMENT CHECKLIST:
1. Choosing to Purchase
1 - Do I need it?
Is the product or service necessary? Have other options for meeting the needs been explored, for example: Have both departmental surplus and Government  Assets Disposal been checked to ensure that no comparable product is available internally.	(qualify)
Have the feasibility of short-term rental or sharing the product been investigated as alternatives to purchasing?	(qualify)
Is the quantity requested appropriate and sure to be used?	(qualify)
Will the product be used to the end of its useful life? If not, can it be easily reallocated?	(qualify)
Once you have determined that a purchase should be made, there are a number of specific product characteristics that can help identify a " greener" item. Be wary of products with unsubstantiated claims. Look for qualifying statements such as actual energy use in Kw/hr or water use per cycle.
2. Assessing the Product	(Coming soon).
SUB TOTAL

 

Understanding the Life Cycle Loads of Different Products

The environmental impacts over the life cycle of products is a simple concept to understand. Essentially the diverse environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, water use, air pollution, non renewable resource material use, chemical emissions and waste amounts are measures along the life of a product through a quantification methodology and accumulated. This quantification allows the results to visually represented delivering guidance for procurers that seek to compare different products. Shown below is a comparison of pure cement against 30% slag blended cement  (Pure cement has been set to 100% and blended cement is shown relative to that)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every product, process and service has an impact upon the environment.  Using life cycle thinking can help our understanding of the types and degree of impacts and where they occur.  Life cycle thinking can also provide information on how changes made in a particular stage of the life cycle affects impacts upstream or downstream .

For example, the highest impacts of some products occur in the extraction of raw materials while for others it is during their use or disposal when higher environmental impacts occur.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking a life cycle perspective can also illustrate the benefits of collecting and recycling packaging materials instead of sending them to landfill; the recyclate can replace the need to use virgin materials.  (One of the highest impacts of a computer is the electricity consumed during its use phase so electronics companies can work towards improving the energy efficiency of computers). Relevance to recyclable packaging?

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has developed as an environmental methodology that assesses the environmental aspects and potential impacts across the life cycle of products, processes and services.   The life cycle encompasses extraction and processing of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation and distribution, use, reuse, maintenance, recycling and final disposal.

A four step LCA process outlined in the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) 14040 standards includes the following:

1. Goal and scope of the study are defined;

2. An inventory of relevant inputs and outputs occurring across the life cycle are collected and compiled;

3. The potential environmental impacts of these inputs and outputs are evaluated (impact assessment); and

4. The results of the previous three stages are interpreted.

Environmental impacts considered in LCA include greenhouse impacts, resource depletion, human and eco-toxicity, eutrophication, photochemical oxidation, water, land use and biodiversity.  LCA can be used in an array of applications such as product and process improvement, strategic decision-making, eco-design, product comparisons, eco-labelling, marketing, and public policy development.   There have been suggestions that LCA should be viewed as a learning device used to identify the impacts generated by activities.  Increasingly LCA provides valuable intelligence to guide strategic and tactical decision making in regards to technology evaluation, product development, industry benchmarking and ecological profiling.

LCA can be performed at different levels.  Two known approaches are "streamlined" or "full".  In a streamlined LCA, public data is generally used along with company or supply chain data and enables sco p ing of key impacts and issues.  A full LCA builds upon a streamlined LCA and includes more detailed information collected from companies operating in the supply chain under study.  The choice of which type of LCA to perform depends upon the goals of the study, time and cost restraints, along with the level of detail and accuracy of the data available to model the product system.

LCA is not suitable for evaluation of very local impacts as it aggregates impacts across the whole production and usage life cycle . For local environmental impact assessment, material flows analysis and risk assessment are still needed to determine if production activities are going to have adverse effects on the local environment in which they are situated.

The output of this methodological approach for green procurement is a set of quantified impact measures across a diverse range of environmental loads. Ideally the methodology is most suitable as a comparative analysis between two products or between a set of consumption and behavior choices.   In undertaking an LCA the environmental impact loads are aggregated along the life cycle of the product.