Moving towards Green Public Procurement in Belgium

Integrating sustainability in the road construction sector is omnipresent and is still gaining interest. This paper specifically addresses the topic of environment-friendly and sustainable procurement of road works (Green Public Procurement). The Belgian Road Research Centre has formed a national working group with members from road administrations, road contractors, and sustainability experts. The main objectives of this working group are to help road authorities (at the national and regional levels) in the process of including sustainability indicators in their road tenders, with a view to achieving Green Public Procurement in their road projects, and to keep abreast of new developments: European guidelines, best practices in the sector, progress in other sectors such as the building industry, and certification in other sectors and in road construction. The aim is to define the most important sustainability (environmental-social-financial) indicators in the life cycle of a road pavement, and use the evaluation of these to come to an overall assessment of the road’s sustainability for use as a criterion in tendering. Pragmatic choices are made from the basket of sustainability indicators to keep the methodology easy and simple yet objective, without aspiring to a full life cycle analysis. A pilot project has been set up with global warming potential, the depletion of materials, noise, responsible sourcing, road availability and annoyance to people, and direct construction costs as environmental, social and financial indicators. Each of these is split up into sub-indicators (such as road transport, recycled contents, tyreroad noise, or rolling resistance) that are all assessed by an easy procedure for both the contractor and the road administration, respectively, thereby delivering and checking the sustainability information in the tender. The evaluation leads to a single value, i.e., a weighted sustainability score. This score affects the actual tender price in such way that direct costs as well as the sustainability score both determine which contractor wins the bid. The paper describes the implementation of the methodology in the pilot project