Note from Matthew W. Grant: I'd like to thank Scot Case for being the first guest blogger here on PurchaseRealm during Know More Media's Guest Blogging Week.
Scot is an expert on the topic of Environmental Purchasing and has written extensively on the subject. This article by him features interesting facts and many resources.
Whether most people know it or not, the purchasing officials working for large organizations have an enormous impact on the world in which we live. Their concentrated purchasing power controls what kinds of goods and services are available for the rest of us and how much we will have to pay for them.
Every purchase has human health and environmental impacts. Manufacturing a typical desktop computer, for example, creates 139-pounds of waste and 49 pounds of hazardous materials. It takes 98 tons of resources to manufacture a single ton of traditional copy paper.
Luckily for us, many institutional purchasers are working to ensure safer products are available. They are using their purchasing power to create or expand markets for safer, more energy-efficient, less toxic, and recycled-content products. (See New American Dream's website, especially the “getting started” section.)
Their large purchases of these safer products make them more widely available and more affordable for the rest of us. Safer cleaning products, for example, are now being used in many public buildings at no additional cost because of the demand created by large purchasers. (See this section of New American Dream's website.)
Various environmental labels are making it much easier to identify the safer products. The new EPEAT standard was developed over a two year period with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funding to identify “green” computers and rank them with a bronze, silver, or gold rating. Other environmental labels such as those developed by Green Seal, Environmental Choice, and other members of the Global Ecolabelling Network are making it much easier to identify safer products. (For additional information, click here.)
Scot Case can be contacted at: scot_case@hotmail.com
» Environmental Full Circle from PurchaseRealm
I've talked about environmentally sound Purchasing policies before in this blog. You may even remember our guest blogger Scot Case and his contribution. Today, I want to discuss what happens on the other end of the Purchasing cycle - wh... [Read More]
Tracked on: July 10, 2006 4:02 PM | Permalink to Trackback