Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

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
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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