Under EU trade rules you cannot judge tender responses on how environmentally conscious a company is, but you can specify eco goods and this is what you should do as far as possible. So, for example, if you ask the market for paper, then you can’t judge the tender on whether respondents have offered recycled paper. But you can ask for recycled paper.

The Helsinki precedent

It helps if your organisational goals include environmental and sustainability issues. My favourite sustainable procurement case study is that of Helsinki City Council and its gas-fired buses which established the principle that a council is different in purchasing terms from a business because it procures for the benefit of citizens not the business.

Helsinki City Council put out a tender for gas-fired buses in 1997 with the explicit aim of reducing carbon emissions, improving air quality and reducing noise pollution. However one company complained that meeting environmental criteria brought no economic advantage to the authority and was discriminatory towards companies who did not supply gas-engined buses.

In a landmark ruling the court decided that:

• Environmental criteria were linked to the subject matter of the contract and that the council’s organisational goals included reduction of carbon emissions, noise pollution and noxious emissions
• The environmental criteria were adequately specific and measurable, and actually verifiable (scientific)
• Councils procure for the benefit of citizens not procurement departments

It's hard to understate the importance of this last point. Councils are not businesses. Businesses buy for the benefit of their business. Councils buy for benefit of their residents.

By the way, 10:10 Camden has bought 20 municipal vehicles to run on biogas made out of food waste. That’s great news because a) it’s using food waste productively rather than letting it decompose in landfill and give off methane which is up to 40 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas when you take into account the water vapour it creates; b) it means 80% fewer carbon emissions than diesel; c) there are no air quality issues. Medical experts now say that living in a diesel-polluted area is equivalent to a lifetime of heavy smoking.  Have you thought about switching your vehicle fleet to biogas made from food waste?

Fresh food and community benefit

Councils spend millions on food for schools, care homes and their own canteens. Under EU trade rules a council cannot specify local or organic or seasonal food in a contract, but they can specify fresh food which is one way to achieve a somewhat more sustainable food supply as fresh food tends to be more local and less processed. There’s also European and UK legislation that permits a “community benefit” approach in public procurement. The European Public Procurement Act 2004 allows community benefit in procurement on a permissive basis and Section 3 of the 2000 Local Government Act gives councils the right to act under power of community well being. Both of these could allow circumnavigation of EU trade rules.