Using national environmental objectives in green public procurement: Method development and application on transport procurement in Sweden

Abstract

Green public procurement can play an important role in reducing the environmental impact of societies. While its uptake is continuously growing, barriers to its use still remain. One barrier previously identified in literature is related to the lack of accessible and easy to use tools that help standardize the development of criteria in green tenders. In this paper, to help overcome this barrier, a method is presented that can be used to develop green public procurement tools that follow previous studies recommendations about including life-cycle assessment-based data and basing procurement criteria on national environmental objectives. The method was then applied to develop a procurement tool for green procurement of public transport services in Sweden based on the Swedish environmental quality objectives. Results from the assessment of 18 pre-defined fuel systems are shown together with an illustrative example of how the tool can be used in the process leading up to procurements to set relevant criteria and during the procurement to adjust incoming tender prices. The results showed that waste-based biomethane and hydrogenated vegetable oil systems were well aligned with the Swedish environmental quality objectives due to being able to contribute positively to several objectives. Crop-based biofuels, on the other hand, performed worse due to negative effects from agricultural practices. The performance of the electric vehicle systems depended in large on how the electricity was generated, where renewable sources and low carbon sources performed better than non-renewable alternatives.

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