Video on circular procurement pilots conducted in Latvia as part of the Circular PP project.

Between 2017 and 2020, Aalborg (Denmark, Malmö (Sweden), and Smiltene and Pļaviņas (Latvia) piloted innovative new approaches to buying circular goods and services as part of the Circular PP project. Their experiences have been collected in this report, which provides a highly useful guide for any other public buyers interested in trying out circular procurement. A summary version is also available.

First video of a video series on socially responsible public procurement (SRPP) and its positive social outcomes, produced within the #WeBuySocialEU project.
It demonstrates how public buyers can promote employment opportunities, decent work, social inclusion, accessibility, design for all, ethical trade, and seek to achieve wider compliance with social standards.

GPP Case Study- The City of Vienna prepares about 100,000 meals every day for kindergartens, schools, medical and nursing facilities and home delivery for pensioners. In 2019, a new framework contract for the supply and delivery of “earthy vegetables”, referring to vegetables growing directly in or on the soil, was needed to supply city-run nursing homes.The City wanted to encourage food sustainability along the entire supply chain, from production to delivery. This included requiring the seedlings to be certified as organic, to encourage suppliers to grow young plants in their own nurseries, using renewable energy, asking for producers to only use organic compost as fertiliser, and finally to encourage bidders to reduce packaging and transportation distance as well as to use low emission transport. All bidders were able to fulfil the criteria, and the winning bidder now provides city nursing homes with 100% certified organic produce.

A report, published by the European Commission, collecting 71 good practice cases on how public buyers have implemented socially responsible public procurement (SRPP), in order to promote employment opportunities, decent work, social inclusion, accessibility, ethical trade, design for all and seeking to achieve wider compliance with social standards.

EC GPP Case Study - The City of Helsingborg applied an open procedure for a framework agreement for a wholesaler who could provide €690,000 worth of food for schools and nursing
homes. The City wanted to ensure that the wholesaler was capable of providing sustainably certified food (i.e. organic or responsible produced palm oil), which is nutritious, ethical, and delivered in packaging that would be easy to recycle.

EC GPP Case Study - Helsinki Service Centre aimed at improving their operations of food transportation to become more customer-friendly and reliable, save costs, significantly reduce the environmental impact of their operations. Three separate calls for tender were published that jointly cover all food transportation and logistics for Helsinki Service Centre.

Discussion Paper - This discussion paper aims to contribute to the European Union (EU) ‘Farm to Fork’ Strategy for sustainable food, which should be launched early in the EU’s 2019-2024 legislative cycle. The paper discusses the potential of public food procurement to leverage a sustainable food systems transition, and explores how the EU can contribute to advance national and local strategic public
food procurement policies.

Environmental NGOs have knowledge and experience with many of the environmental issues addressed by GPP criteria, such as hazardous substances, waste management, energy efficiency etc, and therefore represent vital stakeholders when promoting GPP. The objective of the NGO Network is to increase the uptake of GPP through the EU by building NGO capacity to support public authorities.