A new organization that will help institutional buyers incorporate sustainability in procurement decisions will launch this summer. The Sustainable Purchasing Council (SPC) intends to help organizations "identify and reduce hidden costs associated with unnecessary waste and risk. It will also help organizations identify environmentally responsible actions that produce a return on investment by adding business value."

By recognizing leadership in sustainable purchasing, the SPC is following on the heels of the US Green Building Council’s LEED v4 rating system (also due to release this summer) which will reward Responsible Sourcing of Raw Materials in its new Material and Resource credit. SPC’s steering committee includes representatives from Office Depot, World Resources Institute, Goodyear, American University, the National Association of State Procurement Officials, UL Environment and the U.S. Department of Energy. The goal is to leverage trillions of dollars spent in the construction industry to:

• Reduce the cost of promoting research;

• Share best practices and/or tools;

• Accelerate the market’s adoption of best practices;

• Improve outcomes by getting upstream of downstream impacts;

• Expand market reach through collaboration; and

• Develop new partnerships that support further groundbreaking work.

Launched three years ago, NRMCA’s industry initiative, the Sustainable Concrete Plant (SCP) Certification, offers these same outcomes through best practices for concrete facilities. The SPC certification is a performance-based program to allow ready mixed concrete producers to demonstrate excellence in sustainable sourcing and provide a quantitative metric to use for sustainable purchasers.