Implementing green public procurement: A replication study

The integration of green criteria into public procurement is not a revolutionary thought. However, the large body of scientific literature on this subject so far has devoted little attention to the progress of implementation. Hence, this study examines the extent to which green supplier selection in the form of environmental criteria has already found its way into contract award notices and corresponding tender documents. While similar studies are available to date, they refer to specific procurement categories and regions. Hence, conclusions on the progress of implementing green supplier selection criteria are only possible on a selective basis. This study builds on these results and expands the insights into the implementation of ecological sustainability in cleaning services and equipment in Germany. A replication study was selected, to repeat, validate, and transfer existing findings from other studies. Following the methodological approach proposed by Igarashi et al. (2015), the inclusion of environmental criteria in 160 contract award notices above thresholds has been assessed. Similar to previous studies, the analysis shows that different types of environmental criteria are used and that those criteria are used in different types of documents included in a contract award notice. Environmental criteria are included in 145 of the 160 contract award notices under review. At first glance, this suggests a largely comprehensive inclusion of environmental criteria. However, their content often remained superficial and unspecific. Environmental criteria are mostly included in the specification documents and in the contract clauses. In only 20 of the 160 contract award notices, environmental criteria are also employed as a direct award criteria (as part of a supplier assessment matrix). Even though the weighting of these environmental criteria varies, the average weighting is only 5%. The low weighting shows that the importance of including environmental criteria in cleaning services is not as high as expected. Similar to previous findings, public procurement officers employ four approaches to deal with the implementation of green supplier selection: (1) ignore (no environmental criteria at all), (2) include (environmental criteria as part of existing other criteria), (3) insist (environmental criteria early in the selection process), and (4) integrate (directly compromise between green performance and other traditional purchasing criteria). In addition, a f