Development of Green Public Procurement criteria for water-based heaters : technical report and criteria proposal

Green Public Procurement (GPP) is defined in the Commission Communication "Public procurement for a better environment" as "a process whereby public authorities seek to procure goods, services and works with a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle when compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured." This is a voluntary instrument, which public authorities can use to provide industry with incentives for developing and marketing more environmentally sound products. The primary goals of establishing GPP criteria for water-based heaters are to increase the energy efficiency during operation and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as the use-phase has been identified to contribute the most to the environmental impacts caused by this product group. In addition to energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions, other environmental impact parameters and environmental improvement potentials are taken into account when developing the criteria, such as: lower air emissions related to energy production and consumption, lower resource consumption, potentially higher resource efficiency management (with respect to the issue of recycling and recyclability), etc. Finally, the products covered by the GPP criteria should also bring public customers direct cost savings when evaluated using a life-cycle cost perspective (e.g. lower overall costs due to lower energy bills). This technical analysis is based on a life-cycle analysis of different heating technologies. The technical background report includes a summary of the life-cycle analysis methodology and results, and a discussion on environmental improvement potential that the EU GPP criteria for this product group may bring with respect to the heating technologies currently existing and used in the market today.