Green purchasing is referred to by many names: responsible purchasing, eco-procurement, green procurement, and sustainable purchasing just to name a few. It's a way of adding environmental considerations to the price and performance criteria used by public and private sector procurement officers to make purchasing decisions. Most importantly, green purchasing attempts to identify and reduce the environmental impact of an organization's activities and maximize resource efficiency. Green purchasing is a spending and investment process typically associated with public policy, although it is equally applicable to the private sector. It is linked to the wider agenda of sustainable development. Organizations practicing sustainable procurement meet their needs for goods, services, utilities and works not on a private cost-benefit analysis, but with a view to maximizing net benefits for themselves and the wider world. In doing so they must incorporate extrinsic cost considerations into decisions alongside the conventional procurement criteria of price and quality, although in practice the sustainable impacts of a potential supplier's approach are often assessed as a form of quality consideration. These considerations are typically divided thus: environmental, economic and social (also known as the “triple bottom line”).
Green purchasing consists of choosing products that:
The following are some important attributes of green purchasing: