The European Parliament has changed EU law on public procurement to take social and environmental aspects of products into consideration, instead of just lowest price.
ETIRA reported the changes to EU law, which it notes will “ensure better quality and value for money when public authorities buy or lease works, goods or services”, as well as making it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to put in bids for procurement contracts.
The changes also, “for the first time ever”, create common standards on contracts to “boost fair competition and introduce new award criteria that place more emphasis on environmental considerations, social aspects and innovation”. In turn, bidding procedures will become easier, with a standard European Single Procurement Document, and only the winning bidder in a tender will need to provide original documentation.
ETIRA states that this should “reduce the administrative burden on companies by over 80 percent” according to EU Commission estimates, and that the new rules will “encourage the division of contracts into lots to make it easier for smaller firms to bid” – meaning that offering the lowest price is now “no longer the only criterion for choosing a supplier”.
The new laws are compulsory and apply to all products, with the remanufacturing industry already subject to more specific policies including the new EU Ecolabel, which favours remanufacturing and was reported on earlier this month. ETIRA noted that it “welcomes the specification of the bidding process [and] the new rules”, noting that the “cumbersome paperwork was a major obstacle” to smaller companies that wanted to put in an offer.
Vincent van Dijk, ETIRA’s Secretary General, stated of the changes: “In public tenders, our industry has always suffered from unfair competition by others. Since the start of the economic crises, public authorities often simply choose the cheapest product offered, which in many cases was a Chinese patent-infringing new-build cartridge.
“So doing, they neglected the environmental burden and loss of local jobs that these products represent. I hope the new EU rules will allow remanufacturers, being only small and medium-sized enterprises, to capitalise on their added value: the environment-friendly reuse of a product, and produced by local workers, thus saving natural resources, and creating local jobs.”