Come November and the government will start buying eco-friendly products for its consumption ? be it stationery items or electrical goods ? thanks to the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) which is planning to kick start a process of green public procurement (GPP) from this year.
The ministry will define and certify what it calls green and eco-friendly products and also eco-label them. For this, it has roped in the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to develop green procurement guidelines and build capacity for formulating, implementing, and enforcing the GPP at the national and state levels.
Initially, the government would start with the green procurement of stationery and electrical items like water coolers, refrigerators and heaters and then include all items in the list of the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals.
“The CII will draw the guidelines of each product and then we will decide if the product is green or not on the basis of certain environmental as well as quality parameters. We are following the Japanese model of eco-marking where the certification criteria for every product category includes the environmental impact in the entire life stage of the product-resource extraction, manufacture, distribution, use, disposal and recycling,? said an MoEF official.
Incidentally, India already has an eco-mark scheme ? a voluntary non-binding scheme that labels consumer products as environment-friendly, based on certain environmental and as quality parameters. The scheme was launched for easy identification of environment-friendly products 20 years back but has failed to create an impact. An eco-marked product is given the eco-mark logo? a matka or an earthen pot ? and till date, only 20 licences have been granted to 15 companies.
In fact, through the GPP, the MoEF also plans to create a market for green products through the policy by going through the tender route and giving the contract to the lowest bidder for each product.