Proposal for a Citizen Initiative on Ecological Public Procurement

Citizen Initiative

Proposal for a Citizen Initiative on Ecological Public Procurement

There is no single and clear application framework with specific legislation on aspects of public procurement. Good practices adopted by any country focus, sometimes only on defining requirements of a contract. However, the criterion is not the same in all the countries of the European Union.

There are good practices and recommendations by the competent authorities of the European Union, among them are the definition of requirements in contracts for related aspects of environmental protection such as:

• When defining the subject-matter of a contract, contracting authorities have great freedom to choose what they wish to procure. This allows ample scope for including environmental considerations, provided that this is done without distorting the market, i.e. by limiting or hindering access to it.

• A thorough needs analysis involving the relevant stakeholders will help you to define the scope for greening the contract – as well as avoiding unnecessary purchases.

• Environmental performance levels and particular materials and production methods may be specified, if relevant. Specifications can relate to any stage of the life-cycle, e.g. raw material extraction, processing, packaging, delivery, use phase or disposal.

• Allowing tenders to submit variant bids can assist in finding the most economically advantageous tender which also delivers high environmental performance.

• Technical standards, labels and the EU and national GPP criteria sets are all valuable sources of information when developing a specification. Special conditions apply if you wish to require tenderers to have a label, and equivalent labels must be accepted.

The lack of the same obligatory norms that all the countries of the European Union must comply with hinders the joint and coordinated policy of the different public administrations.