Fife Council makes the right buys

Fife Council has won the Government Opportunities Sustainability Award for piloting a procurement tool that takes into account both the carbon cost of a product and the financial cost of its full life. The tool, dubbed Whole Life Costing + CO2 (WLC+CO2), was developed in partnership with Forum for the Future, and is now used by Fife’s central procurement team.

Fife’s pilot confirms that the tool, in use since early 2009, is simple to operate and covers only verifiable information – making it acceptable under EU rules. It can play a key role in helping the council decide on competing tenders for products and services.

In the words of Keith Grieve, Procurement and Supply Chain Management Team Leader at Fife, the tool “allows you to compare individual products in terms of carbon emissions, and then to apply a value to those emissions which can influence the award of the contract”. He adds that it will be “of great assistance to all organisations trying to reduce their carbon footprint and to green their supply chain”.

Meanwhile, the Forum won the prize for best performing small- and medium-sized enterprise in the Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code Awards. According to Forum’s Sustainability Advisor, Anna Warrington, the award is “a great way of demonstrating to our partners that we share the challenges they face in sustainable procurement – and that they can be overcome. It makes it clear that the advice we offer is grounded in reality”.

“It’s a simple concept – spending your money on goods which improve people’s quality of life and enhance the environment,” says John Bishop, IT and Administration Manager at the Forum. “But,” he adds, “putting it into practice has its challenges, even for an organisation like us.”

9 February 2010