GPPbest - Best practices exchange and strategic tools for GPP

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

BACKGROUND

The most recent European Public Procurement directive emphasises the need for including environmental and social aspects in procurement procedures (i.e. green public procurement – GPP), while promoting a lifecycle costing approach. However, GPP is still not a common and established practice, underlining the evident gap between policy and its implementation. The lack of effective governance of public procurement processes, and of GPP in particular, has two main causes. First, GPP is not recognised as a strategic policy tool and as a result there are no procedures or information systems in place for aiding the inclusion of environmental objectives in procurement practices. Second, public administration often does not have the necessary planning tools and skills to actually exploit all opportunities linked to the implementation of GPP.

OBJECTIVES

The main objective of the LIFE GPPbest project was to contribute to the promotion of new patterns of sustainable consumption and to the development and dissemination of best practices and policy approaches, in order to highlight the benefits of GPP and to favour its wider application.

Specifically, the project aimed to:

improve governance of procurement policies ensuring that they are oriented towards the achievement of sustainable development objectives;

improve skills in the planning and the implementation of GPP policies and plans;

improve information on the economic and environmental benefits of GPP;

transfer the ‘Sardinian model’ for the design, management and implementation of a GPP Plan to other public administrations;

improve skills and tools for the verification of green criteria in the evaluation of offers and in the management and implementation of contracts;

support the diffusion of green procurement processes;

improve methods and practices for GPP accounting;

create GPPbest Activators internal working groups and define Roadmaps for GPPbest implementation in each Italian region and in Romania; and

improve Sardinia’s own plan and define new implementation tools that will then be transferred to other public administrations.

RESULTS

The LIFE GPPbest project contributed to the promotion of new patterns of sustainable consumption and to the development and dissemination of best practices and policy approaches, in order to highlight the benefits of GPP and to favour its wider application through development of national and regional GPP action plans and the production of sample tenders and guidelines for GPP. The project contributed to the implementation of GPP policies in Italy and Romania at local, regional and national level, including the development and approval of 22 GPP official acts by the project participants – the Italian regions of Basilicata, Sardinia and Lazio, along with the Romanian environment ministry. Documents approved included the National GPP Romanian Plan, the adoption/upgrade of Regional GPP Plans in Italy and the approval of a local GPP Action Plan for Bucharest. Moreover, other public authorities have adopted similar plans, as a result of their involvement in GPPbest.

The main project outputs were:

GPPbest catalogue;

GPP regional Action Plans (Basilicata, Sardinia, Lazio and Romania);

36 green tenders developed and published by the project beneficiaries;

47 green tenders developed by external authorities with the help of the project;

a green procurement code adopted in the three central purchase agencies of the regions involved in the project;

several training activities, including laboratories, workshops and webinars, where sample tenders were developed together with public bodies and suppliers;

around 750 public officials participating in project training activities or events;

a GPP monitoring system which helped the creation of the monitoring system adopted in 2019 at national level in Italy;

a GPP guideline supporting public authorities in developing their own GPP plan;

GPP Action Plan for the city of Bucharest; and

support for the improvement of the Romanian GPP Law, which was scheduled to be amended by the end of 2019.

Through the adoption of greener criteria in the more than 80 tenders published, the project contributed to the reduction in GHG emissions, energy consumption, water and raw material consumption, waste sent to landfill and air pollution. However, the project was not able to quantify these benefits precisely, given that they are linked to the goods and services purchased through the tenders and would thus only be determined after the project ended. The environmental benefits were only partially calculated for a limited number, ant the calculations used simple methodologies, so the resulting figures should be considered more as a qualitative picture of the benefits obtained.

The project made a valuable contribution to a range of EU policies, including the Sustainable Consumption and Production/Sustainable Industrial Policy Action Plan, Integrated Product Policy, and EU Green Public Procurement Policy, along with national and local policies related to GPP design and implementation. The Italian Environment Ministry set up the GPP monitoring system in May 2019 and the first national GPP monitoring action was expected to be completed by September 2019, collecting data on GPP tenders in each Italian region.

Further information on the project can be found in the project's layman report and After-LIFE Communication Plan (see "Read more" section).