Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

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Sustainable Development and Society efficient computers and recycled content products, to “environmentally preferable” products. The Executive Orders also require changes in the standards, specifications, and regulations guiding purchasing in the Federal government to be modified to allow for “green” purchasing. These Executive Orders served as important catalysts, rejuvenating or creating new “green” procurement programs including: Buy Recycled Program - Originating in Section 6002 of RCRA (see above), the Buy Recycled Program is the oldest and the most well-established environmental procurement program in the United States. RCRA requires EPA to designate products that can be made with recovered materials and to recommend practices for buying these products, based on a market survey to ensure sufficient availability, reasonable price, and competing vendors. Once a product is designated, agencies are required to buy the product with the highest recovered material content level practicable. 4 Energy Star Program - Originally for private sector purchases, this popular, internationally known program establishes energy efficiency levels for computers and other energy-consuming products. Executive Order 12902 requires Federal government to buy only those computers, monitors, and printers that meet Energy Star requirements. These programs helped to establish the U.S. Government’s presence in demanddriven policies for environmental improvement and have been instrumental in getting the environment on the radar screens of many of the Federal purchasers. And, each program is tied to a very clear mission, based on a single product attribute - like recycled content or energy efficiency. This single attribute focus is not surprising given that environmental management in the first 20 or so years of EPA’s history centered around controlling and cleaning up industrial pollution in disparate pieces-- often shifting the pollutant from one medium to another. This is not to criticize or underplay the tremendous success of this approach in cleaning up the most egregious and noticeable environmental problems. Like the Agency’s past policies in the industrial sector, the few policies and programs directed at influencing consumer behavior and products have been driven by single-issue concerns (e.g., solid waste [Buy Recycled Program], air quality [Energy Star, Green Lights Program], water quality, etc.). However, as the Agency moves away from addressing environmental problems on a single-medium basis to a multi-media systems-based approach that focuses on preventing pollution, programs targeted at the consumer sector will also have to evolve to reflect this paradigm shift. Thus, we need to build on the successes of the singleattribute green procurement programs to introduce the Federal purchasers to a more comprehensive approach to buying green. This broader perspective is reflected in EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics’ Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) Program, which aims to minimize environmental impacts across all environmental media and over the entire life cycle of the products or services purchased by Federal agencies. EPA’s Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program The Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program is an outgrowth of Executive Order 13101, which mandates the U.S. Federal 59
Sustainable Development and Society Government to identify and give preferences to those products and services that pose fewer burdens on the environment when compared to competing products or services that serve the same purpose. This definition goes on further to say that this comparison should consider environmental impacts across the various life-cycle stages of the product. EPA’s Five Guiding Principles for EPP Guiding Principle 1: Environmental considerations should become part of normal purchasing practice, consistent with such traditional factors as product safety, price, performance, and availability. Guiding Principle 2: Consideration of environmental preferability should begin early in the acquisition process and be rooted in the ethic of pollution prevention, which strives to eliminate or reduce, up-front, potential risks to human health and the environment. Guiding Principle 3: A product or service's environmental preferability is a function of multiple attributes from a life cycle perspective. Guiding Principle 4: Determining environmental preferability might involve comparing environmental impacts. In comparing environmental impacts, Federal agencies should consider: the reversibility and geographic scale of the environmental impacts, the degree of difference among competing products or services, and the overriding importance of protecting human health. Guiding Principle 5: Comprehensive, accurate, and meaningful information about the environmental performance of products or services is necessary in order to determine environmental preferability. purchasing decisions. 5 However this broad approach fell short of Federal agencies’ expectations for a set of “how to” directions from EPA on incorporating human health and environmental considerations into their purchasing decisions. This need led EPA to develop a number of tools and resources to help Federal purchasers apply these broad principles to specific acquisitions (See Figure 2). EPA’s Purchasing Tool Suite The Federal Government does not endorse specific products, but the EPA has developed a number of tools and resources to begin to help Federal purchasers find the products that meet their environmental goals and mandates. EPA’s purchasing tool suite was developed with Federal employees in mind, but will also be useful for others in the private and public sectors, including product designers, manufacturers, suppliers, and purchasers. EPA has different approaches for different types of procurements and product categories. A tailored approach and level of analysis have been employed to fit the complexity of the product and service categories. Some of the tools and resources available on-line include: General EPP Training Tool: Basic EPP principles, along with some more in-depth applications of EPP, are introduced in an entertaining and interactive multimedia format. www.epa.gov/epp/gentt/index.htm 60 In 1999, EPA published “Final Guidance on the Acquisition of Environmentally Preferable Products and Services,” the first articulation of U.S. policy on “green” products and services. The Guide is a broad framework within which Federal agencies can make more environmentally preferable Database of Environmental Information for Products & Services: This searchable database includes productspecific information (e.g., environmental standards and contract language). www.epa.gov/epp/database.htm
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Preface Lillian Richter, “Childre
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