What Biden’s Green Procurement Bill Means.

One of the first things President Biden did when he came into office was launch an executive order on green procurement.

That is, he put requirements in place for all US government procurement around sustainability and the reduction of C02 emissions.

Specifically, agencies are directed to seek carbon-free electricity by 2030, zero-emission vehicle emissions by 2035, net-zero-emission from federal procurement overall by 2050, a net-zero building portfolio by 2045, and net-zero emissions from federal operations overall by 2050.

As the threat of global warming increases, governments around the world are also beginning to tighten their procurement processes to be inclusive of environmental impacts and reorient their procurement practices.

These new requirements will obviously flow through to suppliers, who may in time be required to track and report against their own Co2 emissions, use ‘green materials’, and account for the sustainability of their own supply chain.

It may be that sustainability performance indicators may add a weighting within the procurement process itself, certainly, there have been murmurs of that in both the US and in the UK’s Green Paper of Procurement. While it is still early days for most governments in this space, it is expected to grow as an area of considerable focus in the short to medium term.

At Spend Network, we’ve been looking at how governments can reduce Co2 emissions through procurement. So focusing first on the UK, we set out to generate a Co2 value for every contract in the UK. By using our state-of-the-art machine learning tools, plus a lot of data cleaning. This is our first attempt to visualise that work and we will be working to improve and broaden the dashboard.

But, we’ve got a view, data that we can act on, and that has to be a good thing.

You can review the dashboard here, and you’re welcome to feedback on your thoughts here.