Sustainable Procurement Home Page

What is Sustainable Procurement?

Sustainable Procurement is a process whereby organisations meet their needs for goods, services, works and utilities in a way that achieves value for money on a whole life basis in terms of generating benefits not only to the organisation, but also to society and the economy, while minimising damage to the environment.

- Procuring the Future - Sustainable Procurement Task Force, June 2006

Sustainable procurement is an approach to procurement which acknowledges that there are social, environmental and economic impacts (positive and negative) associated with the production and delivery of the goods and services bought by public sector organisations. The aim of sustainable procurement is to minimise any negative associated outcomes and to maximise the positive.

Adopting a more sustainable approach to procurement offers public sector bodies an opportunity to secure 'added value', in the form of environmental, social and economic benefits.

Sustainable procurement is NOT intrinsically more expensive, developing more efficient supply chains can reduce both costs and carbon emissions.
Whilst some products may have a higher upfront cost they may have high operational and maintenance costs and therefore over the operational lifetime of the product prove to be a more expensive option. In some cases of course a product may simply be more costly but there may be a good reason for this as in the case of fairly traded foodstuffs.

The RIEP is keen to explore opportunities for improving the sustainability of regional public sector procurement with a particular emphasis on identifying opportunities for reconciling the efficiency and sustainability agendas.

To this end it has established a sub-group to focus on this topic as part of the Policy and Practice Harmonisation element of the Collaborative Procurement Programme. Information concerning this group will be placed on this site in due course.

Sustainable Procurement- RIEP activity

There are currently four main areas of work. Click on the links below to find out more about each area, and to see the Projects for that area.

Sustainable & Efficient Food Supply Chains

Sustainable Timber Procurement

Policy and Practice - Sustainable Procurement Working Group (information coming soon)

National Sustainable Procurement Group

Further information

To find out more about Sustainable Procurement, contact the Project Manager, Bill Kirkup on 07766 500 054, or email Bill at Bill.kirkup@northeastcouncils.gov.uk.