Green Purchasing, also known as Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) is important, and not just because we’d need the resources of five (5) earths to sustain us if everyone in the world consumed like the developed world did (and the US, Australia, and Canada in particular). It’s important because purchasers, be they government, corporate, or institutional, yield a great influence over the future of the planet with every buying decision they make – and because every purchase has a hidden cost on the environment.

Public sector and private sector institutional buying combined accounts for the vast majority of spending in most developed countries. It’s true that we as consumers in developed countries buy a lot, but when you consider that we’re (almost) always buying from a private sector company that is in turn spending 60% t0 80% of its revenues buying raw materials, products, and services from other businesses, and that, in some countries, public sector buying alone accounts for as much as 25% of GDP, it’s easy to see that, combined, purchasers ultimately control 70%++ of GDP in much of the developed world. Thus, if we were to refuse to buy products that were not green, we would effectively force our suppliers to provide us with green products, as the alternatives would be for those suppliers to go out of business.

So what is green purchasing? Simply put it’s one of the three cornerstones of sustainable purchasing, where the other two cornerstones are sound social policy and economic soundness. However, whereas economic soundness insures that the overall decision is sound from a life-cycle cost and corporate sustainability perspective, and whereas social policy addresses your need to be a responsible corporate citizen when it comes to human rights and welfare, green purchasing addresses the environmental impact of your buying decision.

One might think that buying green is the easiest criterion of the spend triumvirate to meet now that we have “organic” and “local” food and “eco-friendly” labeling and “energy-star” standards, but it is, in fact, the most challenging criterion! A food product does not necessarily have a low carbon footprint just because it is “organic” or “local”; just because a product is “eco-friendly” when used, does not mean that it’s production process was “eco-friendly”; and just because a product is “energy-star” compliant does not mean that it will have the best overall energy utilization.

Buying local produce makes sense during the fall harvest season, because you’re eliminating the carbon footprint that accompanies transportation, but it does not make sense in the spring when all the product is coming from greenhouses. Why? The energy footprint associated with a greenhouse often has a much higher carbon footprint than transporting products by land from the opposite hemisphere. Eco-friendly detergent is much better than hazardous bleach, but if it’s been produced in a factory that (still) uses a process that generates toxic chemicals as byproducts, it’s not very eco-friendly at all. And your average energy-star desktop workstation still consumes 80+ watts of power, which really adds up if your employees never turn them off. If all your employees are doing is word-processing and internet purchasing, they could be using a thin-client that only consumes 4W of power when in use, and a fraction of a watt in standby mode, hosted on a multi-core modern server that supports automatic power-down of processors, drives, and power supplies when utilization drops below a certain threshold.

Because green purchasing is so important, and because it can be difficult to know the right thing to do in each situation, we created the Green Purchasing wiki-paper on the e-Sourcing Wiki to help you start on the green grass path.