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Sustainable Purchasing Guides

Guides and resources that can help reduce the environmental impact of your organization’s purchasing choices.

The following Sustainable Purchasing Guides (SPGs) were designed to provide specific policy-driven product and service direction for more sustainable purchasing in a 2-page format that agency leads can use as a communication tool to agency staff who make purchasing decisions.  Each Sustainable Purchasing Guide contains:

What other types of environmentally preferable office supplies are available?

Look for rechargeable batteries, water-based and non-toxic highlighters and markers, and 10-100% postconsumer recycled content plastic trash bag liners. Plastic desktop accessories like notepad and pencil holders, trays and organizers can be made with 25-80% postconsumer content. Plastic binders can contain up to 100% postconsumer recycled content, depending on the type of plastic.

Will these types of products be inferior quality?

Many recycled or environmentally preferable products compare well in quality to their virgin counterparts. As with any product on the market, quality depends on several factors. For example, a commercial toilet tissue manufacturer may offer two levels of quality: an economy (lower quality) and a premium quality product. Quality may also depend on the product’s maturity in the market. The quality of recycled paper, for instance, has come a long way in the last 20 years. For the most part, its quality is just as high as that of virgin paper. 

Do recycled content or environmentally preferable products cost more?

Overall, cost differences will depend on the product, its quality and the existing market conditions. There are environmentally preferable products that cost less than their conventional counterparts. For example, several recycled printing papers cost less than virgin papers. Recycled plastic trash can liners (for commercial use) cost less than virgin because the postconsumer plastic resin currently has a lower market price than virgin plastic resin. The price of re-refined motor oil is now comparable to virgin motor oil.

How do I get started purchasing more of these products?

“Green” purchasing is no different from any other form of product evaluation usually done before a purchase is made, be it by governments, businesses or consumers. Environmental purchasing simply considers a greater range of product criteria. Departments may begin an environmental purchasing program by focusing initially on certain types of products or services and expanding to others as they gain experience.

When looking for recycled content products, what do the terms “postconsumer,” “pre-consumer” and “total recycled content” mean?

Recycled products may contain either a percentage of materials collected from office/curbside recycling programs (postconsumer), a percentage of materials generated after the manufacture of a product but before it reaches the end-user (pre-consumer) and/or virgin materials. The combination of postconsumer and pre-consumer content provides the total recycled content. For example, recycled content copy paper with 30% postconsumer and 10% pre-consumer content would have 40% total recycled content. 

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