Quantifying the Benefits of Green Purchasing

EPA’s Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) Program compiled resources for quantifying the benefits of green purchasing in "Promoting Green Purchasing: Tools and Resources to Quantify the Benefits of Environmentally Preferable Purchasing."

This brief guide is designed to help Federal offices meet some of the challenges of green purchasing, by identifying a series of existing tools and resources which they can use to (1) help develop quantitative estimates of the projected benefits of making new EPP choices and (2) document the estimated benefits of past EPP actions. The tools and other resources tend to focus on environmental benefits, although some address other areas such as cost savings. Some of the resources are calculators, where users can enter set inputs and obtain outputs estimating impacts in their situation. Other resources are guides, collections of policies, lists of products, data collection and tracking instruments, etc.

The document is organized around EPA's "Greening" Goals areas. For each Goal, EPA's Objectives are listed and types of benefits from meeting the Goal are noted. Next, for each area you will find a chart that identifies the tools, their source (e.g., web site), inputs, outputs, possible uses, and other information. At the end of the document is a list of acronyms and a few useful conversion factors.