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.
Highlights
Public procurement accounts for approximately 10 to 15% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of developed countries [1,2,3], and in other countries, these values are even greater [4,5]
Environmental action plans appear as one of the main environmental criteria used and include the organisation of the environmental team, the actions to reduce and recycle the waste generated during the work, measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels, and the increased use of renewable energy
green public procurement (GPP) is an important topic for sustainable development that should be further developed and whose future implementation needs to be better defined
Summary
Public procurement accounts for approximately 10 to 15% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of developed countries [1,2,3], and in other countries, these values are even greater [4,5]. In the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg in 2002, an implementation plan to support regional and national initiatives was created to accelerate the shift towards sustainable consumption and production (SCP) and de-link economic growth from environmental degradation. The current EU regulatory framework is Directive 2014/24/EU [26] on public procurement (repealing Directive 2004/18/EC) [27] Both standards deal with environmental characteristics such as tendering criteria. Relevant environmental criteria must contemplate contract requirements from an environmentally friendly point of view, such as the reduction of emissions or noise, reduced consumption of resources, etc. These criteria, as far as possible, should be measurable and not assessed by value judgments [8]. Many advances have been carried out on GPP in the last decade, and it has become one of the primary pillars in the environmental and procurement policies of the European Union [31,32,33] and around the world (USA [34], China [35], Hong Kong [36]), and including developing countries (for example, Malaysia [37], Vietnam [38])
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