WASHINGTON DC – The Office of Contracting and Procurement, on behalf of the District of Columbia and Mayor Gray’s Sustainable DC Initiative, will participate in the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council Annual Meeting beginning today. 

During two days of intensive workshops and panels, leaders from government, industry, academia, standards organizations and NGOs will collaborate on the creation of a multi-sector guidance, benchmarking, and recognition program for institutional leadership in sustainable purchasing.  Public and private sector organizations will use the program to guide trillions of dollars in collective purchasing towards goods and services that produce maximum benefit for their organization, society, and the planet.

The annual meeting is directly aligned with the Office of Contracting and Procurement’s effort to establish a best practice Sustainable Purchasing Program for the District of Columbia. The program is a city-wide endeavor that aims to prioritize potentially sustainable product and services, establish clear and consistent specifications in chosen product categories, revise policies and procedures so as to embed sustainable purchasing decisions in the procurement process, and strengthen internal and external outreach efforts.

The meeting will include purchasers from many large private and public sector organizations that collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, including: Aflac, ARAMARK, Bloomberg, Caesars Entertainment, Ernst & Young, FedEx, Hilton, Interface, Kohler, Lockheed Martin, Office Depot, and UPS, the governments of California, Minnesota and Nova Scotia, the US General Services Administration, US Department of Energy and US Environmental Protection Agency, the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Washington DC, the counties of Alameda, King, and Multnomah, the universities of Arizona State, Michigan State, American, Emory and Texas at Austin. A current list of organizations that will be participating in the meeting can be found at: www.purchasingcouncil.org/meeting14

At the May meeting, attendees will collaborate in solutions-oriented workshops, contributing their expertise and experience to identifying best practices, existing guidance, tools, and metrics.  The output of each workshop will be used over the following months by expert panels, called Technical Advisory Groups, to inform the development of a pilot-ready first draft of the Council’s guidance, benchmarking and recognition program. 

For more information on the OCP Sustainable Purchasing Program, please visit http://ocp.dc.gov/page/sustainable-purchasing