Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

Sustainable Development and Society
Environmentally
Preferable Purchasing:
The Progress and Remaining Challenges
of Multi-Attribute Decisionmaking
By Alison Kinn-Bennett
Alison Kinn-Bennett is the Model Green Construction Specifications Project Officer,
for the US Environmental Protection Agency, Environmentally Preferable Purchasing
Program in Washington, DC.
Consumers can play an integral role in
improving environmental and public
health through their purchasing
patterns. By demanding certain attributes,
consumers can send a clear signal to
manufacturers about their preferences for
those products and services that pose
fewer burdens on the environment. By
leveraging their purchasing power,
consumers are voting with their
pocketbooks, directly affecting
manufacturers’ bottom lines. Some
manufacturers are attuned to this market
signal and have recognized that
differentiating their products on the basis of
environmental attributes can serve as a
competitive advantage.
As the single largest consumer of goods
and services, spending over $250 billion
annually on a wide variety and large
quantity of products and services, the U.S.
Federal government leaves a large
environmental footprint. By the same
token, it can wield its purchasing power to
propel companies to manufacture products
and services that pose fewer burdens on
the environment and thereby leverage and
jump-start the market for “green” products
in both the public and private sectors. 1 In
The Benefits of Environmentally
Preferable Purchasing
• Improved ability to meet environmental goals
through markets rather than mandates
• Improved worker safety and health
• Reduced liabilities
• Reduced disposal costs
the environmental arena, the fact that paper
with recovered materials content has
become the norm is an example of how
purchases of such goods by the Federal
government made them more widely
acceptable and available.
However, despite this potential, the
Government has not relied heavily on
demand-driven policies to achieve
environmental improvement, and the
market for “green” products remains a
niche market in many sectors. Why? In
part, this is because there currently is no
existing infrastructure that can easily
facilitate the identification of “green”
products and services for American
consumers. Although there are a number of
private sector environmental labeling or
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