What you buy shapes your carbon footprint. Procurement decisions determine how much electricity you use when you email, how much water you flush away when you use the bathroom, and even how much stuff you chuck in the bin.

That means procurement professionals have the opportunity to make huge cuts in their organisations’ carbon emissions. They can buy equipment which is more energy efficient, which requires less water in its use, and which produces less waste.

And by happy coincidence, often these more sustainable choices will save you money, resulting in lower utility bills and cost reductions under the Carbon Reduction Commitment.

But knowing what supplier or product will help you reduce your emissions most, and whether this will save money over time, can be tricky, especially when working within the EU procurement rules.

That’s why Forum for the Future and Fife Council teamed up to develop the award-winning Whole Life Costing + CO2 tool (WLC+CO2).

The tool helps procurers to understand the CO2 cost as well as the whole life financial costs of a product. It calculates how much CO2 will be emitted by different products during the contract period, and how much these emissions will cost under the Carbon Reduction Commitment or other carbon pricing schemes.

The new tool has been piloted by Fife Council and is now in use by their central procurement team. “It will be of great assistance to all organisations which are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and green the supply chain," believes Keith Grieve, the council’s Procurement and Supply Chain Management Team Leader.

He says the tool is “allowing us to compare individual products in terms of carbon emissions and to apply a value to those emissions which in turn can influence the award of the contract.”

Fife’s pilot confirms that the tool is simple to use and covers only verifiable information - making it acceptable under EU rules. The council was awarded the Government Opportunities Sustainability Award for its use of the tool in October 2009.

The WLC+CO2 tool builds on the whole life costing module of Forum’s popular Sustainable Procurement Toolkit, which allows procurers to calculate costs across the whole life of a product. It adds the ability to calculate the costs of CO2 emissions from the product.

We’d recommend using both tools to fully embed sustainability into procurement – the Sustainable Procurement Toolkit to help you review the demand for your product and to plan what actions you will take during the procurement process to maximise sustainability, and then the new WLC+CO2 tool to help you evaluate your tenders.

Both tools and the accompanying guidance are now available to everyone.

Please email Anna Warrington for your copy or for more information.

Download the guidance notes for the tool.