Over the past decade we all have been provided the opportunity to become more responsible in purchasing the goods and services that we use on a daily basis. What started out with a few retailers serving a niche market has evolved into a larger consciousness among retailers to satisfy, or at least appear to be satisfying, a greater consumer demand for ecologically and socially responsible manufactured goods. There is much debate in marketing academia about the environmentally conscious chicken and the environmentally conscious egg, but regardless of how it began, the move toward mindful purchasing has proven to have the momentum required to permanently shift how consumers image the products and services they purchase. As evidence of this shift, we only have to look at Wal-Mart’s recent brand adjustment toward environmental consciousness. Sure, Target was doing these eight years ago and profited nicely from the move. Wal-Mart’s decision to change both their purchasing and human resource policies to at least be in a currently acceptable range of environmental and social consciousness is the imprimatur for the movement in the worldwide retail arena.

We are very happy about this.

We are also pleased to see that federal and state agencies are beginning to incorporate language into solicitations that requires potential suppliers of goods and services to be able to present their capabilities in limiting or reducing impacts to the natural environment during the performance of their work. An example of this requirement in a solicitation follows:

“Greening/Recycling/Waste Prevention Efforts: In accordance with federal efforts to reduce waste, the contractor shall also document all efforts related to recycling and waste reduction. Contractors shall provide products and services that include: alternatives to hazardous waste; bio-based products; non-ozone depleting substances; recycled products; and, environmentally preferable products as defined by the EPA. Preferred products and categories are listed on the EPA’s web-site:”

Many providers of architectural, engineering, and environmental services may read that clause in a solicitation and disregard it immediately as irrelevant to the supply of their particular service. But by including this requirement in solicitations two consecutive things have occurred. First, a potential supplier has given, perhaps for the first time, thought to the possibility of reducing waste. Second, the potential supplier has, we hope, given thought to the possibility of employing waste reduction or other environmentally responsible actions as a competitive differentiator. We sincerely hope so, anyway.

Even construction companies and managers are getting in on the “green” action. Click on the following link to read about a recent construction job in Plano, Texas where the city actually paid more for environmentally friendlier cement: Plano Texas Cement.

And it isn’t just state agencies going green. The EPA keeps on its website case studies of contractors who have made great contributions to eliminating waste and working with more kindness toward our natural environment. Read all of them here: EPA Lean and Green.

Now, no article covering socially and ecologically responsible purchasing would be complete without addressing the emotional aspects of the entire movement. I will address this in much more detail in upcoming articles, but let’s look at one element here, and that is the query, should our government agencies be incorporating requirements for reducing waste or limiting environmental impact at a time when everyone, and we mean everyone from individuals to major corporations to individual government agencies, are experiencing a starvation of resources?

Our position: Absolutely. Our reasoning: Regardless of your position along the political spectrum, the fact is our planet has a limited amount of resources and the world’s population is expanding. Do the math. On balance, the population of our country has shown a strong desire to spend its money on goods and services that are heading in the direction of doing less damage to our natural environment. In a representative democracy the government is us. Our elected leaders spend our money. We want those responsible for executing our laws to use our collective resources in a manner consistent with our collective consciousness, and the requirements appearing in agency solicitations are an extension of our collective will. A loud but weak counterargument is that in these dire economic times we should forgo these requirements, which some may say place a burden on contractors who are already desperate for work to expend resources they don’t have. This argument is entirely without merit for two reasons. First, these requirements apply to all bidders. It can’t reasonably be argued that elimination of environmental harm places an undue burden on one contractor and not another. Should a solicitation include a requirement that cannot be met by any contractor, the whole solicitation would be scrapped and reworded until requirements can be met. By the nature of fair and open solicitations all bidders have the same opportunity to present solutions at their best price. In America, we love fairness, and this is ultimately fair. Second, everyone reading this article was alive in 2006 and hopefully enjoying the great prosperity we experienced as a nation in the first half of this decade. If a supplier had been employing the abundance of resources in those years to eliminate waste and work toward environmental friendliness, they would be in a prime position to use that experience as a competitive differentiator in pursuing government business. They would win because they have done the right thing in the recent past and should be rewarded for that. Also, our government, us, has long used times of crisis to implement socially and environmentally responsible policies. As proponents of these policies, we encourage that sort of behavior.