Green criteria and the public administration: only 53% of municipalities comply with them in tenders

Only 53 per cent of municipalities manage to accurately implement green policies and comply with minimum environmental criteria in tenders. This is the average index of environmental performance in local contracting stations, measured on public tenders published in 2023. A performance that improves to 77% in local authorities of provincial capitals, while it drops to 52% in non-provincial capitals.

This is stated by the Osservatorio Appalti Verdi (Green Procurement Observatory) of Legambiente and Fondazione Ecosistemi, which will be presented today as part of the National Ecoforum on the Circular Economy: the report takes a snapshot of the trend in the application of Green public procurement (GPP) and the Minimum Environmental Criteria (MC) in tenders.

The GPP - promoted at European level - defines a sustainable framework along the procurement chain of the public administration, from gender procurement to the abandonment of environmentally impactful products, such as single-use. Moreover, since 2016 the application of CAMs in public tenders has become mandatory, in order to convey sustainability in the procurement of products, services and works: it was Article 34 of the old Procurement Code (Legislative Decree 50/2016) that introduced the obligation, later confirmed in Article 57 of the new code (Legislative Decree 36/2023). The objective - also embraced by many professionals who assist administrations in drawing up calls for tenders - is twofold: on the one hand to reduce the environmental impact, and on the other hand to exert a 'pull effect' on the market for ecological products.

Now in its seventh edition, the Observatory organises into an average performance index the answers of a sample of 800 municipalities (747 non-capital cities and 53 provincial capitals) to the questionnaire on tenders issued last year. While central administrations - also under the impetus of Consip, the national central purchasing body, and other aggregators on a regional basis - have been supporting large-scale GPP programmes for years, at a local level local authorities still struggle to integrate environmental considerations into public purchasing procedures. 86% of those interviewed declare that they are aware of the green procurement tool and 60.5% promote the adoption of plastic free tenders; but only 11.5% consider it a priority to pursue the monitoring of 'green procurement' and only 43% intend to invest in training in this area.

The minimum environmental criteria - 16 in all that were examined in the report - translate the Action Plan for Sustainable Consumption of Local Authorities into concrete terms in tenders. The report shows that CAM were used in tenders and correctly applied in 66% of the cases (482 cases out of 727 analysed); in 7% they were not applied, despite the fact that calls for tenders were made that should have foreseen them; in the remaining 27% the CAM "was not always applied".