EPA offers guidance on nature-friendly procurement

The Environmental Protection Agency Friday issued a guide on how to be nice to nature when purchasing goods for the federal government.

Rather than trying to save the world all at once, EPA recommends that agencies identify an environmental problem they want or need to address. Another approach is identifying a product or service category with which procurement professionals can begin seeding a green purchasing movement for their agency.

The idea is to get federal buyers thinking about both the short-term and long-term environmental impacts of their acquisition decisions.

"Environmental considerations should become part of normal purchasing practice, consistent with such traditional factors as product safety, price, performance and availability," the EPA's new "Guidance on Environmentally Preferable Purchasing" suggests.

The environmentalists at EPA don't expect buyers to become eco-fanatics. "An extensive life-cycle assessment might not [need to] be conducted to purchase rubber bands," the guide says, but the agency's experts note that skimping on environmental considerations now can lead to major cleanup, liability and disposal costs for the government down the road.

So with the government's procurement focus shifting from lowest bidder to best value, "a reasonable price premium may be justified because the environmental attributes of a product or service provide offsetting reductions in operating and disposal costs," the guide points out.

EPA offers case studies to guide eco-movements in the acquisition ranks.

When the General Services Administration, for example, focused in on cleaning products, it found that the more effective cleaning supplies tended to have more health problems associated with them. In addition, while one product may have had less excess packaging, another may have had less potential to cause air pollution. Given that quandary, GSA developed a matrix ranking numerous products in the various areas of environmental impact and performance. Purchasing officials use the matrix to balance the trade-offs between various products.

The new guide is based on Executive Order 13101, issued by President Clinton in September 1998. That order called on agencies to make environmental considerations a factor in procurement decisions.

The guide was published in the Aug. 20 Federal Register.