Abstract
Research on current practices and the state of green public procurement enables the identification of areas that can be improved, as well as opportunities to improve the tendering procedures from an environmental point of view. To understand the behaviour of local, provincial, and regional administrations concerning green public procurement, a case study on the Valencia region of Spain is made. The Valencian region is one of the most important communities in terms of population, number of contracting authorities, and weight in the Spanish Gross Domestic Product. In this study, a total of 967 procedures were analysed from calls for tenders made by municipal, provincial, and regional administrations in2016 and 2017.The results of this study show that the use of environmental criteria is 19.7% and the average weight is 4.1 out of 100. The civil engineering subsector, more than the building subsector, employs environmental criteria, particularly in projects tendered by regional administrations, whereas for projects with large budgets the level of use is similar for both subsectors. It is necessary to encourage plans to improve Green Public Procurement (GPP) practices in the Valencian administrations, especially those with a local scope such as municipalities.
Highlights
Public authorities are one of the main consumers of products, services, and works, and can play a crucial role in making consumption more sustainable [1,2]
The results showed that green public procurement (GPP) is much more established in large municipalities than in small ones, with more resources available to establish a purchasing department with greater knowledge and selection criteria
Researchers analysed objective data from public tender documents obtained from calls for tenders, and quantified the results obtained by their transformation and parameterisation into indicators and Content analysis is the qualitative, objective, and systematic method [63,64]
Summary
Public authorities are one of the main consumers of products, services, and works, and can play a crucial role in making consumption more sustainable [1,2]. Administrations have the potential to guide production and consumption trends by encouraging demand for environmentally friendly products and services [12,13,14,15]. For this reason, interest in GPP has increased significantly in recent years [16]. Act9/2017 [26], which entered into force in March 2018 According to this legislation, contractual requirements must consider environmental criteria such as reduced emissions, noise, reduced consumption of resources, etc. Some authors [27] warn about the difficulty of monitoring environmental conditions during the execution of a project, the adopted criteria should preferably be measurable, since one of the main difficulties in the application of the GPP is the vagueness and lack of clarity in its definition [2,8,28]
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