Environmental Impacts of Transport as Award Criteria in Public Road Construction Procurement

Abstract

Green practices and the life cycle approach are increasingly being adopted in the public procurement of road construction works. One example is the Finnish pilot project ‘Improvement of Highway 9’ carried out by the Finnish Road Administration in 2004, which aimed at using a life cycle assessment (LCA) in formulating the environmental award criteria in the tender competition.Although public purchasers are being encouraged to apply more LCA-based environmental criteria in their procurement, the extent to which the EU legislation on public procurement complies with this aim is not straightforward. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the LCA-based environmental award criteria used in the ‘Highway 9’ pilot project from the viewpoint of the basic principles and subsequent legislation on public procurement in the EU, focusing on the relationship between transport distance as an award criterion and the public procurement legislation. This study is carried out as an analysis of the legal aspects of the LCA-based environmental award criteria that were used in this specific case. The compliance of the environmental award criteria with the EU’s legal framework of public procurement is assessed by analyzing to what extent the criteria fulfil the requirements based on the procurement directives and Treaty principles, also called a ‘test of general principles’.The transport distance of materials is an inherent part of the scientific method LCA, but, due to the legal framework, it is not obvious that the offers can be evaluated in relation to the environmental burdens of transport without potentially discriminating against some bidders. Nevertheless, this paper looks for conditions and justifications to use the criterion of ‘transport distance’ and, more generally, the ‘environmental impacts of transportation’ as award criteria in the procurement of construction works within the EU. The ‘Highway 9’ pilot serves as a progressive example of taking green criteria, especially the environmental impacts of transportation, into account in the award criteria for road construction contracts.