Cradle to Cradle and Sustainable Public Procurement

Sustainable public procurement is all about taking environmental and social aspects into account during every stage of the procurement process. Together with local authorities, the Government wants to stimulate the market for sustainable products by leading by example and by itself adopting sustainable procurement practices. Organisations will be able to procure products and services sustainably by including sustainability criteria in all of their calls for tenders and procurement processes. The Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, together with the authorities, has drawn up sustainability criteria for a number of product groups. These sustainability criteria can be downloaded from www.agentschapnl.nl/duurzaaminkopen.

These sustainable procurement criteria will form the basis for the sustainability that the Government wishes to put into practice. But much more is possible. Some Government organisations want to go further than these criteria. For those organisations, the adoption of the sustainability criteria is already common practice and their sustainability aspirations are more far-reaching. They are likely to get acquainted with Cradle to Cradle at some point. In any case, for these and other organisations this brochure explains how the Cradle to Cradle philosophy can be applied to the procurement process.