Albany, New York

Green Seal is a non-profit (501(c)(3)) organization founded in 1989 with the mission to create a more sustainable economy by identifying and promoting environmentally responsible products and services. Our flagship program, certification, involves developing life-cycle-based environmental standards for specific categories of products and services, and certifying individual products and services that meet these leadership standards. We also work with institutions to make their purchasing, operations, and facilities management more environmentally responsible; in particular, over the past dozen years we have worked with governments at all levels in our Greening Your Government Program. Many of Green Seal's standards, reports, and guidance have been used by governments in their procurement specifications.

New York State has already pioneered in several areas of green procurement, and we urge the State to continue this leadership by designing and implementing a more comprehensive green procurement program. For years the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has promoted energy-efficient products and services. Last year's Executive Order 134 and law S 5435 promoted use of green cleaning chemicals in all State agencies and schools. The time is ripe to expand these achievements to many other important areas.

One of the purposes of this hearing is to determine if green procurement can be widely implemented in a practical, cost-effective way. The answer is yes, and you need look no farther than your neighbors for examples. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has instituted a broad green procurement program across a number of product and service categories that is a model for the nation. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has implemented a number of green procurement actions and related programs in sustainable buildings and green lodging.

In fact, green procurement can help promote a better and healthier environment for States without compromising the traditional procurement values of cost-efficiency and product performance. When environmental and health attributes are integrated into procurement specifications along with traditional requirements, they ensure that well-performing, cost-effective products that are more healthful and sustainable are procured and used by the State. Traditional metrics such as cost can be expanded through life-cycle costing to consider the long-term costs of a product or service; often, the purchase with lowest initial cost turns out to be most costly in the long run. And we believe that all "green" products must perform comparably with traditional products, and that this should be written into standards and specifications.

If specifications are written carefully, they can ensure that enough suppliers will be able to bid to maintain the competitiveness of a purchase. As with any market mechanism, State bids for green products will attract vendors if the specifications can be met by some products in the market and the value is attractive. Perhaps the only insurmountable obstacle occurs when there is a Babel of different bid specifications around the country for the same product category that no manufacturer could possibly meet; hence, the value of a single, commonly accepted environmental standard for a product or service category.

Our experience in working with the State of California is instructive in terms of how New York State might proceed. In 2002-2003, Green Seal was engaged by California's Procurement Division to assist in institutionalizing a green procurement program. One of the key components of that project was coordination across agencies, with regard to both how product specifications should be set and how purchasers would be encouraged to buy green. Another critical component in managing the task of greening literally thousands of purchase categories was priority-setting: we developed an algorithm for ranking the State's purchases by significance in terms of purchase volume, environmental effect, and environmental improvement potential.

However, California also demonstrated what can happen to a green procurement initiative if it is not based on a mandate, either by statute, executive order, or, at minimum, administrative policy. Subsequent events - including an energy crisis and a change of administrations - put the green procurement initiative essentially on hold for several years. A far-reaching executive order mandating green procurement was first drafted in 2001 and is only now being dusted off for re-consideration. A basic law (AB 498) was passed in 2002 to encourage green procurement and provide some infrastructure for it (e.g., training, best practices manual), but no specific requirements and deadlines were included for implementing green procurement. We very much stress that any green procurement mandate should be specific as to implementation goals.

Ultimately, the implementation of green procurement will hinge on the availability of sound environmental criteria or standards for products and services. These must be explicit; independent of any conflict-of-interest; based on the life-cycle effects of the product or service; and developed in an open and transparent process. Organizations like Green Seal have been developing such standards for a number of years, but there are certainly many categories for which standards do not yet exist. A concerted effort by leaders such as New York State and others to provide for the filling of these gaps would be very beneficial for the cause of green procurement everywhere.

In conclusion, green procurement is definitely implementable. From the perspective of encouraging a more healthful workplace for State employees and a better-quality environment for State citizens, green procurement is not only desirable but also necessary and inevitable. Our message to manufacturers also makes sense here: why would New York State want to buy products with toxic substances that are less efficient and wasteful when products that perform as well and are sustainable can be purchased instead?