Sustainable procurement has become the standard for buyers. While price used to be the primary deciding factor, today, procurement decisions increasingly take environmental and social impact into account. This shift is also evident in waste management procurement and tendering.
What is sustainable procurement?
Sustainable procurement means that organizations consider not only price when purchasing, but also environmental, social and economic impact throughout the life cycle of a product or service. This concept overlaps with Socially Responsible Purchasing (SRI). However, in addition to environmental aspects, SRI also includes social and ethical criteria, such as fair working conditions and social inclusion.
Due to stricter legislation, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive(CSRD) the climate agreement, as well as increasing social pressure, the focus on sustainable procurement is growing rapidly. For example, government agencies in Friesland want 25% of their procurement to be circular by 2025 and to increase this percentage to 75% by 2030.In addition, the Flemish Green Deal Circular Procurement brought together more than 150 organizations to stimulate circular procurement.
Sustainable purchasing can take various forms, including:
- Environmental and climate friendly procurement: focusing on reducing CO2 emissions and energy consumption
- Circular procurement: focusing on encouraging reuse and a closed raw material cycle.
- Bio-based procurement: opting for materials from renewable sources.
- Social procurement: focusing on social return and compliance with international conditions
- Local procurement: Promoting short chains and reducing transport emissions.
- Life cycle cost analysis: Choosing products with lower total costs over their lifetime, including environmental impacts.
- Innovative procurement: Encourage sustainable innovations through specific requirements in tenders.
- Low-waste procurement: Reduce packaging materials and choose products that generate less waste.
Why include sustainability in decisions?
Sustainable procurement helps organizations to make conscious choices and reduce risks throughout the procurement chain. For example, by purchasing in a socially responsible manner. This means that suppliers adhere to international labor standards and ensure fair working conditions. Climate issues are also playing an increasingly important role. Regulations such as the CSRD require companies to provide insight into their efforts to make the chain more sustainable. This requires concrete actions, such as reducing CO₂ emissions, ensuring social standards and dealing responsibly with raw materials.
Sustainability is playing an increasing role in tender processes and tenders. In some cases, it is even becoming a hard requirement within the chain. For example, organizations can require their suppliers to obtain an Ecovadis certificate or a CO2 performance ladder. To meet these requirements, it is important to make sustainability part of the procurement policy.
Sustainability also has benefits for your organization. It shows that you make conscious choices, which not only helps with legislation and regulations, but also with strengthening relationships with customers, investors and partners. This strengthens your brand, shows that your organization takes sustainability seriously and contributes to a long-term partnership.
How do you go about this for sustainable waste management?
Sustainable procurement goes beyond products and services: waste management is an important part of it. The choice of a waste partner determines how effectively your organization separates waste, preserves resources and contributes to circular processes. But how do you find a supplier that matches your sustainability ambitions? How do you ensure that sustainability, fairness and social values are considered, not just costs?
Below we explain in four simple steps how you can do this:
Step 1: Choose the right procurement method
Choosing the right procurement method is an important first step toward sustainable waste management. Many procurement methods are tightly regulated but leave little room for innovative ideas from suppliers. How do you ensure that this knowledge and experience are put to good use?
Best Value Procurement (BVP) is a procurement method that revolves around cooperation and making clear agreements. Here the knowledge and experience of suppliers is central, so that they can contribute optimally to better resource and waste management. Do you want to use BVP? The National Better Procurement Program offers useful tips. For example, by setting clear goals, having good discussions with suppliers and encouraging new ideas.
Awarding on value is another method that focuses on quality and sustainability. It works as follows: achievements, such as environmentally friendly solutions or innovations, are expressed in a score in euros. This score is deducted from the tender price, giving suppliers who score better on quality and sustainability a high chance. In this way, not only the lowest price is considered, but also what a provider really has to offer.
In addition to BVP and Award for Value, there are other methods that include sustainability in the procurement process, such as functional specification, competitive dialogue, sustainability as an award criterion and performance procurement.
Step 2: Gaining insight
In order to procure waste management sustainably, insight into waste streams is important. This insight gives a grip on what is released within your organization and shows where optimizations are needed.
By identifying which materials and waste streams are suitable for reuse and what the ecological impact is, you can set targeted requirements for suppliers. This way you prevent valuable raw materials from being lost. Tools such as Madaster and Raw Materials help with this by providing insight into the composition and reuse possibilities of materials. This makes it easier to make circular choices within your procurement process.
Understanding the CO2 impact of materials and waste streams helps to select suppliers that contribute to reducing environmental impact. These insights help you select suppliers that contribute to reducing environmental impact and support you in complying with regulations such as the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive). This directive requires organizations to report on sustainability performance throughout the value chain, including the impact of suppliers and raw materials used.
Step 3: Choose to use
Traditionally, procurement has revolved around owning products and materials. In a circular economy, however, the focus shifts to use rather than own. This means suppliers remain responsible for the materials they supply.
The ownership of materials, raw materials and products changes in the process. Instead of looking only at the cost of ownership(Total Cost of Ownership) or the cost of waste disposal (Total Cost of Waste), the focus shifts to the cost of use (Total Cost of Usership). This means it is important to look at how materials are used, rather than who owns them. This shift makes it easier to use raw materials more sustainably and encourages circular solutions.
As a buyer, you can apply this by entering into contracts where suppliers take responsibility for reusing materials and reducing waste. This creates more sustainable solutions and can ultimately save costs.
Step 4: Make use of labels and guidelines
There are several labels that show how sustainable suppliers are, such as Ecovadis. The ISO 20400 guideline also provides practical tips for making a procurement process socially responsible.
More and more developments are steering sustainable purchasing toward circular purchasing. Platforms such as Pianoo and Nevi encourage this process with platforms such as ikwilcirculairinkopen.nl, which help organizations adapt their procurement processes to the principles of the circular economy.
Sustainable procurement starts with waste management
Without the right data and KPIs, the value of waste management remains untapped within procurement. At Milgro, we help organizations not only identify areas for improvement, but also actively monitor waste streams and translate them into concrete improvements, such as better separation of specific waste streams and adjusting purchasing decisions to generate less waste.
Our approach gives your organization insight and control over waste streams. This allows you to make more targeted purchasing decisions that not only reduce costs, but also ensure less waste and a more sustainable purchasing policy. This means that sustainable procurement not only remains an ambition, but becomes a concrete and measurable part of daily business operations.
Want to know more?
Milgro provides the tools and expertise to optimize waste streams and accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Discover what we can do for your organization. Book a free (online) consultation.
