Sustainable purchasing in Poland: a story of transformation

Right now, “value for money” is one of the basic principles of public procurement in Poland. Yes, there are legal mechanisms designed to improve societal and environmental outcomes. But they cannot be automatically applied in all public contracts — due to the primacy of efficiency and competitiveness requirements.

However, if these requirements are met, such mechanisms may be applied as much as possible, and some are even obligatory. To put it simply, contracting authorities may require supplies and services to comply with environmental or social requirements if it is justified.

Although these requirements are mainly optional, their use is actively promoted, and more and more contracting authorities integrate them in procurement. The number and value of sustainable public procurement is on an upward trend and is reported annually by the Polish Public Procurement Office.

We are ready and willing to make our IT purchasing more sustainable. And we do recognize the importance of other aspects related to social and environmental responsibility in the supply chain. However, we pay attention to quality and performance first.

The greatest challenge here is to include societal and environmental factors in costing, especially across the entire supply chain. And each additional requirement has its financial impact. Since public purchasers use limited public funds, they have to justify their decisions price-wise, and consider long-term financial consequences of purchases, which currently is not so easy to express directly.

Considering the mainly optional nature of environmental and social requirements, I believe that a good starting point is an analysis of applied requirements and their effects on specific procurement, including social and environmental.

Today, there is no shortage of knowledge; we have access to training and best practices in sustainable procurement. The Polish Public Procurement Office also provides useful information and resources. However, it does come down to contracting authorities and their attitude to Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), whether they are ready to go beyond scope and set ‘non-compulsory’ requirements, or not.

As part of central public procurements for the judiciary, we use TCO Certified requirements for the purchase of four categories of IT equipment: computers, all-in-one computers, monitors, and laptops. We started using TCO Certified because doing so helped us include sustainability in long-term framework agreements, along with the establishment of a dynamic purchasing system, over the years deliveries are made in parts.

We also conducted a detailed analysis of the TCO Certified requirements and saw the advantages of applying them in terms of a number of social and environmental outcomes across the entire supply chain.

Ultimately, we had no legal problems with using the certification, although it required a bit more work on our part. However, we consider public procurement in a broad perspective of effectiveness, meaning that we pay attention to long-term effects, including ecological and social effects. Therefore, we believe it is justified by efficiency and in accordance with European and Polish procurement law to apply such requirements as socially and environmentally responsible production, extended product life and the phase-out of hazardous substances, among others.

Equally importantly, end users of the equipment are satisfied with these requirements, as they result in high quality hardware. In addition, we have received bids for various product models from several manufacturers confirming that TCO Certified requirements do not have a negative impact on competitiveness.