Introducing environmental decision-making criteria to foster Green Public Procurement in Peru
Authors: Biberos-Bendezú Karen , Cárdenas Úrsula , Kahhat Ramzy , Vázquez-Rowe Ian 
Published: July 2021

Governments in the Global South have recently started to align their public procurement regulations considering Green Public Procurement (GPP) guidelines to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 12. In this context, it is important to establish environmental criteria to help decision making after analyzing the variety of options available in the market. Thus, using as examples two of the most acquired products in public procurement in Peru: Medium-density particleboard melamine furniture and paper offset, the aim of this paper is to determine the main environmental hotspots and therefore show the path to foster GPP in Peru. To achieve this goal, a Life Cycle Assessment was carried out considering it is a suitable environmental management tool to quantify environmental impacts. For this, a set of scenarios were modeled and compared for each of the two products selected, covering different geographical and technological options that are currently purchased by the Peruvian government. Results demonstrated that it is possible to attain considerable reductions in the environmental impact of the products analyzed if the main critical stages throughout their life cycle are identified and adequate solutions are applied to avoid burden shifting. Moreover, we argue that it is important for developing countries to carry out case-specific life-cycle inventories as they provide higher-quality information based on the particular characteristics of regional or local industries, allowing the determination of more realistic environmental impact mitigation benchmarks. Nevertheless, the inclusion of lifecycle-based criteria in GPP must be performed cautiously, avoiding command and control regulations, as numerous challenges remain in terms of capacity building, environmental awareness, and environmental information, and transparency in emerging and developing economies. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2022;18:1206–1220. © 2021 SETAC

KEY POINTS

Latin American governments are currently aligning their public procurement regulations with Green Public Procurement (GPP) guidelines to comply with international environmental recommendations, such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Considering that these nations struggle to develop empirical data to support GPP initiatives, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is presented as an attractive environmental management tool to quantify environmental impacts and orient GPP regulations. Two of the most acquired public procurement products in Peru, melamine furniture and paper offset, were evaluated using LCA to identify environmental hotspots, the sensitivity of the results through scenario analysis, and improvement actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. Despite the existing challenges linked to building environmental information in Peru, case-specific life-cycle inventories for regional industries have proved to allow the determination of realistic environmental impact mitigation benchmarks to include in GPP.