# Measuring the Effect of Circular Public Procurement on Government's Environmental Impact
## 3 Results
### Calculated Effects  
The actual effects could be estimated for 10 of the 14 CPP criteria applications, in effect using information on the operationalization and existing LCA data. In the other four cases, the effects could not be estimated. This was due to a lack of data on product design (e.g., percentage of recycled content) and the number of products supplied within the contract. For example, for ICT hardware, one tender set a requirement on the supply of refurbished smartphones during the contract phase when requested by the customer. The contracting authority, however, did not hold accounts on the number of refurbished phones supplied during the contract, and therefore, an effect could not be estimated. The CPP criteria that led to a measurable effect in present day practice in the Netherlands were the following:  
* A longer lifetime than the average product (furniture and road construction);
* Refurbishment (furniture);
* Higher recycled contents than the average product (workwear and road construction);
* Sustainability scores or certificates (road construction) which lead to products with longer lifetimes and higher recycled contents. The results of the effect calculations are presented below per sample and after extrapolation to the whole longlist as indications of the total environmental benefits of CPP for these product groups. For furniture, 5 of the 10 tenders requested and were supplied furniture with a life span of 15 (2 tenders) or 20 (3 tenders) years instead of the average 10-year guarantee (the market standard). Information on the amounts of furniture supplied within the contracts were retrieved from four of the five contracting authorities. We assumed there would be 1% repair per 10 years. The effect was estimated using Equation (1), where _ICP_ was defined as the impact of the requested amount of furniture and 2% repair and _IP_ was defined as the impact of 1.5 or 2 times the amount of furniture and 1% repair. LCA data for this comparison were based on the product category rules defined within the project INSIDE/INSIDE (DGBC, [38]). In total, the estimated impact of the use phase of furniture was a saving of 520 tons of CO\({}_{2}\)eq. emissions and 100 tons of materials used for these 4 tenders (Supplementary Materials S2) [28]. Furthermore, 2 out of the 10 tenders focused on refurbishing furniture during the contract period. Information on the amounts of furniture refurbished within the first 2 years of the contract could be retrieved from one of the two contracting authorities. Again, the calculations were based on reference profiles provided by INSIDE/INSIDE ([39]), defining the use of furniture for 10 years as a functional unit. The estimated effect for the tender was savings of 110 tons of CO2 eq. and 30 tons of material (details and references can be found in Supplementary Materials S2). Together the measures in the sample, this resulted in savings of 630 tons of CO2 eq. and 130 tons of materials, which is extrapolated to the longlist of 2960 tons of CO2 eq. and 590 tons of materials. For road construction, 4 of the 10 tenders requested a high score on the certification scheme's CO2 performance ladder [36]. The ladder has several steps which require actions with regard to insight, reduction of energy use, transparency and participation in activities to green the supply chain the applicant is involved in. In all four tenders, a supplier was selected with a high-level certificate (level 5). In three of the four tenders, the supplier proposed circularity measures, of which some were selected by the contracting authorities. In one case, this resulted in a longer life expectancy of the asphalt. Calculations of the impact were based on the Dutch National Milieu Database (NMD) [40] and provided by the supplier. In a second tender, asphalt with 30% recycled content in the top layer was applied, resulting in estimated savings of 469 tons of CO2 eq. and 7560 tons of materials. The third tender also used this higher content of recycled content, but the work under this tender was not finished yet.