# Assessing the Degree of Sustainability Integration in Canadian Public Sector Procurement
## 3 Methodology
### Expanse of Sustainability Integration  
Sustainability is complex and advancing towards it involves meaningfully addressing diverse areas of impact ranging from environmental considerations such as greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and recycled content to social considerations such as economic participation, health impacts, and inequalities. From an industry perspective, making meaningful progress in the majority of businesses will require addressing a number of material impact areas that will differ across industries. For example, in order to truly advance sustainability, the construction industry will need to consider such impacts as embedded carbon in materials, end of life management for waste, and economic sustainability of workers. In the IT industry, meaningful consideration will need to be given to carbon emissions from product usage, recycled content within products, and to worker conditions throughout the supply chain, in particular in the mineral extraction phase due to conflict minerals. Although in some business areas, like consulting within the large services category, a narrower focus on social considerations may be sufficient, our assessment led us to believe that at a macro level, consideration of a breadth of material impacts was key to demonstrating a comprehensive approach to sustainability and enabling greater comparability across bidders. In order to understand the breadth, we assessed the number of specific impact areas being considered within the environmental and social categories.  
Our scheme for assessing the expanse of sustainability integration, outlined in Figure 4, evaluates RFPs based on the extent to which both social and environmental criteria are addressed. The bottom tier includes those RFPs that include any base-level sustainability language from either social or environmental areas. An example of a narrow RFP is one from the IT category in a municipality (see Figure 5). The RFP placed emphasis on reducing impacts associated with travel and shipping yet lacked consideration of critical impact areas ranging from emissions within the product life cycle, energy usage, and inclusion of recycled content, to living wage, and use of conflict minerals. This demonstrates a narrow focus on sustainability and would limit the potential impact as well as distort the ability to meaningfully assess and compare across vendors.  
The second tier consists of RFPs that include considerations in a minimum of three separate impact areas covering both the environmental and social elements. This would include language around environmental and social impact areas, ranging from plastics reduction to workplace diversity. To reach the third tier, an RFP must have established clear and specific considerations in a minimum of five environmental and social impact areas. To be scored in this tier, considerations would need to go beyond general statements or links to policies and include distinct areas of attention. For example, a general statement outlining a preference for environmental or sustainable products or services would not be considered specific, while a statement outlining a preference for biodegradable or Forest Stewardship Council certified products would be considered specific.