Article Tools

• Bookmark

Advertisement

Most Popular News

• Accurately measuring pay in the public sector
• Government spending legislation aims to audit GSA each year
• Investigations could lead to tighter controls on agency spending

Know before you buy or sell. Get your truck's value instantly online.

Find Your Truck Now

*To see the actual values, you must purchase a subscription or a single-vehicle lookup.

Acceleration of green products in the marketplace over the past decade makes it easy for public procurement professionals implementing environmentally preferable purchasing (EPP) policies to spend all their time focused on green commodity purchases such as paper, office supplies and lighting. After all, most of the market's ecolabels and related standards have focused on these types of goods. But what about professional services such as engineers, architects, health care services, and consultants? In contrast, among services, the green market barely makes a dent.

Common advice when first implementing an EPP policy is to "start with the low-hanging fruit." Advisers subsequently cite examples such as recycled-content paper, energy-efficient electronics and third-party certified cleaners, all of which are fairly common in the marketplace, have well-recognized ecolabels and are easily verifiable. In contrast, few such standards or ecolabels apply to professional services. Yet, for many municipalities, professional services make up the vast majority of their procurement spend. According to a recent article by Sarah Chacko in the Federal Times, "contract spending [by federal agencies] on 15 types of professional and management support services quadrupled from $10 billion in 2000 to $40 billion in 2010." Clearly, there is a lot of money being spent on these types of contracts. So where is the "low-hanging fruit"?

Boilerplate language

The first step for many agencies often involves ensuring all solicitation and contract templates, whether for commodities or for services, incorporate certain boilerplate EPP language. EPP procedures in Spokane, Wash., require all city departments to "ensure that requests for bids and proposals issued by the department ask that contractors and consultants use recycled paper and both sides of paper sheets whenever practicable." In addition to similar paper requirements, the City of Seattle adds other green initiatives to their boilerplates, such as no-idling language.

Public agencies can take the next step to reduce the environmental and human impacts of professional services by going beyond boilerplates and focusing on the unique deliverables of each solicitation or contract.

Identify the deliverables

Although ecolabels and related standards are largely absent in the professional services marketplace, the approach to greening these procurements is not all that different from the approach taken for goods. Before the green movement took hold of commodity markets, procurement professionals looking for environmentally preferable products had to start with the basics: what are the physical qualities or impacts of the product that could be made in a safer, less-polluting, or less resource-dependent manner? The same approach applies to professional services: what are the deliverables? How can those deliverables be completed in a way that reduces environmental and human health impacts?

As with commodities, public agencies typically require a large variety of professional services; so the task of identifying how to "green" those contracts may seem overwhelming. And while there will likely be some services that are not practical to "green," there are some common themes to greening professional service deliverables. Examples of these themes include:

Deliverable: Design/product specifications. Many professional services, from architects and engineers to trade-specific consultants, involve design and product specification deliverables. Specifications for these services can require compliance with known green product standards/ecolabels, energy efficient systems, value-based engineering, or green building certification standards (e.g. the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard - LEED). Evaluative criteria can gauge the vendor's experience, education and training on these focus areas.

Deliverable: Workshops/meeting coordination. Many consultant services involve meeting facilitation and coordination. Specifications can require that the consultant follow green meeting practices: waste minimization, sustainable catering, public transit options, etc. (For more information go to www.bluegreenmeetings.org.) Evaluative criteria can explore the vendor's experience with, and knowledge of, minimizing meeting-related waste and resource use.