Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing society as a whole. Rising temperatures, extreme weather events or premature deaths due to air quality are some of the most notable consequences of the urgency of intervening with policies that help to alleviate this situation.
One of the closest targets set by Europe is a 55% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 1990 by 2030. This objective entails policies and actions by Europe and its member countries, which also include the more than necessary promotion of the circular economy.
Transforming the public sector is a major task because it requires a change of mentality, an orientation and focus on sustainability that permeates all activities. Access to information, training or tools to help perform the job in an efficient, intuitive and sustainable manner is one of the barriers that public servants face in this regard.
Public procurement accounted for 11.5% of GDP in 2024, so measuring its environmental impact is not trivial, as it represents a significant percentage. To overcome the barriers faced by the administration in this regard with the design of intuitive and effective tools is what Novadays has done with Circular Procurement Suite.
This tool aims to integrate all possible circularity and sustainability criteria so that proposals received in tenders can be evaluated more reliably with standardized criteria, a simple life cycle assessment mechanism and carbon footprint calculation, among others.
Circular Procurement Suite and this article have been elaborated in the framework of the project "Digital transformation of public procurement processes to boost Circular Public Procurement" (EXP/EC/2023/00313), which is a beneficiary of the call for grants to boost the Circular Economy in business for the year 2022 in the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR) funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU.