Analysis of Green Public Procurement of Works by Spanish Public Universities

Abstract

Universities play an important role among public institutions because they initiate huge purchasing and contracting activities and contribute to sustainable development through education, research, and day-to-day operations. Existing studies on green public procurement (GPP) practices at Spanish universities focus on products and services. For this study, a total of 316 procedures were collected and analysed from the calls for tenders made by Spanish public universities between 2016 and 2017. The environmental criteria involved in the tenders and their weights were classified by subsector, geographical scope, and project budget. The results of this study show the use of environmental criteria in the works tendered by Spanish public universities is low (19.2%) in comparison with the results of other studies. It is therefore necessary to encourage GPP practices in the contracting process to comply with the environmental policies that universities have defined as part of their institutional policies.

Green Public Procurement in the Academic Literature

“…Policies that affect the level of GPP implementation and which of them have the most significant influence on the environmental performance of public entities could be analysed (Testa et al, 2016b). Further research should examine the current state of GPP implementation, provide incentives for the development of tools that encourage GPP (Fuentes- Bargues et al, 2018;Viñé et al, 2013), analyse how the government should be involved in the development of voluntary standards as a starting point in designing public procurement policies (Simcoe and Toffel, 2014).…”

“…Numerous difficulties related to the GPP were highlighted in the analysed studies. Among them, we mention the lack of clarity of the environmental criteria (Michelsen and de Boer, 2009;Testa et al, 2012;Nissinen et al, 2009), the existence of too generic criteria, which prevents the easy verification by the contracting authority for their compliance (Fuentes-Bargues et al, 2017), the poor presence of environmental criteria in the evaluation of tenders, rarely affecting the awarding decisions (Varnäs et al, 2009;Fuentes-Bargues et al, 2018 ), including them mainly as technical specifications (Testa et al, 2016b). The use of environmental criteria is encountered in the case of national administrations to a greater extent, because they have more resources and better training of personnel on environmental issues (Fuentes-Bargues et al, 2017).…”

“…The environmental criteria analysed in the studies are waste disposal during production, use of harmful substances, working environment and environmental management system (Varnäs et al, 2009), energy efficiency of equipment, installations and buildings (Fuentes-Bargues et al, 2018), the use of less chemicals in furniture products and the use of chemicals that are less harmful on health and the environment (Parikka-Alhola, 2008).…”

“…Further research is needed to clarify the inclusion of environmental criteria in the tenders and their actual use in the selection of suppliers (for example, understanding the discrepancy between the degree to which municipalities declare that in the final selection of suppliers they take into account the environmental aspects and the perception of that have potential suppliers, the search for possible relationships between an increased use of environmental criteria in the tenders and a possible increased use in the final selection of the supplier - Michelsen and Boer, 2009;Faith-Ell, 2005;Fet and et al, 2011), identifying the stages of the procurement process in which environmental criteria are included and analysing the role they play in the award of the contract (Testa et al, 2012), checking whether the projects that contained more environmental preferences were more expensive than others (Varnäs et al, 2009), the development of assessment tools for the environmental criteria in the contracting process (Fuentes-Bargues et al, 2018), analysis of the extent to which the contract award decisions were influenced by environmental considerations (Testa et al, 2016b), elaboration of the criteria for environment that quantifies the provisions proposed by the bidders (Fuentes-Bargues et al, 2017). Testa et al (2012) argue that, in the future, specialists should establish whether there are differences in the implementation of GPPs between product categories and for which public authorities have encountered greater obstacles, to analyse the effects of different types of environmental criteria, such as performance and functional criteria and to investigate the synergies between the available European environmental policy instruments, including GPPs, the eco-label, EMAS and the environmental footprint of the product, to highlight the strengths and weaknesses and ways to improve these synergies.…”

The Adoption of National Green Procurement Plans from the Perspective of Circular Economy

“…Recent studies have identified the influence of Digital Division on Big Data generation in the context of green supply chain (Gravili et al, 2018). Another equally important direction was aimed at sustainable public procurement through researches highlighting that the decisions to implement green public procurement have impact on the entire economic and social life, such as: employee satisfaction (Snell, 2006); government initiatives (Steurer et al, 2007); local administration (Preuss, 2009); public and private sectors (Walker and Branner, 2009) and in the academic environment as well (Fuentes- Bargues et al, 2018). Studies on green procurement in the private sector had also been identified, reflecting the interplay of good practices between the public and private sectors (Carter et al, 2000;Appolloni et al, 2014), but also the barriers that may intervene along the way (Giunipero et al, 2012) in the sense of limiting green procurement (Walker et al, 2008;Kaufmann et al, 2012).…”