Promoting environmentally sound furniture by green public procurement

Abstract

Green Public Procurement (GPP) can be seen as a promising method to promote environmentally sound product design and motivate manufacturers to make products with reduced environmental impacts. For furniture, environmental impacts are quite limited during use but more associated with production and disposal. The requirements and criteria for furniture purchasing should be targeted to those environmental aspects that have the most influence and could, through eco-design, lead to the greatest environmental benefits. In order to do this, an RPS selection tool (Relevance–Potential–Steerability) is used. It is a tool developed for the assessment of the feasibility of eco-labelling criteria for a certain product group, and is applied in this study. The purpose of this paper is to recognize the major environmental aspects of furniture and to analyze to which extent they are taken into consideration in public purchasing, i.e., in the calls for tenders. The paper begins with describing the concepts of GPP and eco-design, as well as essential elements in this context such as the ‘most economically advantageous’ tender, the environmental aspects of furniture, eco-labels and eco-design strategies. The article continues with an analysis of 31 calls for tenders of furniture, including 15 Finnish and 16 Swedish calls for tenders. Finally, the paper discusses about the potential of GPP in promoting eco-design of furniture, i.e., what criteria are relevant from the view point of eco-design. The criteria that were presented in the studied calls for tenders seemed to be relevant from this perspective and subsequently may encourage eco-design among furniture manufacturers.

Introduction

Over the last decade, public procurement has become a promising tool to foster the demand for greener products as public purchasers have increasingly placed environmental requirements on their procurement. Public organizations, having enormous purchasing power with 16% of the EU's GDP, may promote environmentally sound product design and ‘green’ the product value chain by changing their purchasing function towards greener procurement i.e., Green Public Procurement (GPP) (EU, 2004). Considering that office furniture is among the most interesting products for the GPP policy (Erdmenger, 2003, Brander and Olsthoorn, 2003), GPP could thus indirectly effect on the eco-design of furniture as the criteria in the public tenders could be used as guidelines in the development of greener products.

Although there is no legislative pressure in the furniture sector, many manufacturers are becoming more aware of their responsibility to make more environmentally sound furniture. Environmental objectives in purchasing place pressure on designers to integrate environmental criteria into the production processes and the final product (Maxwell and van der Vorst, 2003, Shapiro and White, 1999). Some of the most important decisions with respect to environmental properties of a new product are taken during the product development (Nielsen and Wenzel, 2002). Deeper knowledge of the environmental impacts of the materials and processes used in the furniture industry, as well as awareness of the customers' criteria for ecological furniture enable companies to ‘green’ their products.

The aim of this paper is to analyze to which extent the most important characteristics of environmentally sound furniture are taken into account in the calls for tenders of public purchasers, and subsequently what the potential of the public purchases to promote eco-design of furniture in companies is. The results also show the kind of environmental criteria the purchasers actually use in the procurement of office furniture. The paper discusses the potential of GPP in stimulating eco-design of furniture, i.e., whether those environmental criteria that were found in the calls for tenders are also relevant from the perspective of eco-design strategies. For this purpose, a method (i.e., the RPS method) was applied to assess the relevance, potential and steerability of each environmental criterion.