Purchasers are encouraged to evaluate multiple environmental impacts of everyday products through their life cycle and to select products with attributes that minimize environmental and health risks. A product’s environmental attributes can include:

• Energy efficiency

• Recycled content

• Recyclability

• Durability

• Water conservation

• Resource sustainability

• Waste prevention

• Non-toxic material content

• Minimized packaging

Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) means considering multiple environmental attributes of products and services before buying. It’s a market-based approach to making environmental improvement and protecting human health through our purchases, without sacrificing price or performance. EPP also means not purchasing—or reducing the purchase of—certain products or services that may have detrimental environmental or public health effects. 

 

An important step in purchasing environmentally preferable products for an agency or business is to gain management support. Adopting an agency-wide or corporate Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Policy can help with this effort. This website offers a Model Environmentally Preferable Purchasing (EPP) Policy that provides a menu of purchasing policy options. StopWaste's Green Purchasing Resources include a guide to purchasing strategies for green maintenance and operations, and product fact sheets with lists of local suppliers.

Here are just a few of the many available listings of "environmentally-friendly" household and business products:

Many recycled or environmentally preferable products compare well in quality to their virgin material 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 twenty years. For the most part, its quality is just as high as that of virgin paper. 

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. The price of re-refined motor oil is now comparable to virgin motor oil. Also, many public agencies in the Bay Area and across the country have seen no overall cost increase after switching to “green” cleaning products.

“Green” purchasing is no different from any other form of product evaluation usually done before a purchase is made, whether 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.

 

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% percent pre-consumer content would have 40% total recycled content. 

 

Choosing environmentally preferable products and services can reduce or eliminate the environmental and health impacts of your purchases. 100% recycled content paper, for example, can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent, cut solid waste disposal by nearly 40%, decrease water use by 50 percent, and practically eliminate wood use. And one ton of 30% postconsumer recycled content paper (40 cartons of 10 reams each) saves over 7 trees.