Theme 2: Sustainable products and services
Research Projects 05/06
Project EP01022 – Policy Coverage of Environmental Impacts of Materials
Project EP01022 is a scoping study investigating the environmental burdens associated with three materials at each stage of their life cycle, including their use in products and their final disposal.
It assess the potential externalities associated with these burdens and reviews the policies in place to address these burdens (the policy coverage), considering both economic instruments and other forms of legislation.
The final three materials investigated were:
- Plastics (PET)
- Iron and steel
- Wood
The study discusses the methodological issues involved with using LCA data and draws conclusions on the policy coverage of these materials and the transferability of the work carried out.
Project EP01025 – Product Policy and Environmental Tradeoffs
Project EP01025 assess how actions brought about by the EU Framework Directive for setting eco-design requirements for energy-using products (2005/32/EC) have affected or are perceived to affect related product polices.
Overall the study identified ten issues that interplayed with the relevant Directive and related legislation – of these seven comprised synergies and the remaining three where categorised as potential conflicts or risks.
Impacts of food production and consumption
Research under this area has involved the integration and interpretation of publicly available evidence.
Project EV02007 – Impacts of food production and consumption
This research report provides evidence to inform the development of Government policy aimed at the reduction of the global environmental impacts of UK food consumption. It synthesises publicly available information, identifies gaps, and makes recommendations for the further development of information on more sustainable food choices which would have value to the food industry in general, producers and consumers.
Project EV02018 – Review of food chain sustainability literature
Sustainable procurement
Research under this theme during 2005/6 focussed on building the evidence base for sustainable public procurement and specifically to provide information for the deliberations of the Sustainable Procurement Task Force in the development of a national action plan.
Project EP01024 - Cost Benefit Analysis of Sustainable Public Procurement
Project EP01024 provides a cost benefit analysis (CBA) of a sample of sustainable public procurement initiatives to evaluate their efficacy as a policy tool. The study demonstrates that CBA can provide valuable information on the societal impacts of sustainable procurement. CBA can reveal tradeoffs between different sorts of benefits and costs, and can serve as a project design tool to help maximise selected net benefits.
Project EV02011 - Downstream impacts of sustainable procurement
This project aimed to build evidence for the impacts of sustainable public procurement activities on downstream supply-chain behaviours, including whether workplace practices become replicated in the home, through reviewing and analysing initiatives from across the world, evaluating their impacts and data quality and generating fresh data where appropriate.
Project EV02013 - Successful Approaches to Sustainable Procurement
The aim of this research was to obtain a clear understanding of the factors that contribute towards the success (or failure) of sustainable procurement initiatives. It involved: exploring why organisations are motivated to adopt sustainable procurement practices; how organisations define ‘success’; what problems and barriers they have encountered; and identifying the costs and benefits that have resulted from their sustainable procurement schemes.
Project EBCD1 – Sustainable Consumption and Production Evidence Base – Sustainable Procurement
This project aimed to develop a better understanding of the potential for public procurement activity to contribute to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production through an evaluation of existing sustainable procurement approaches, the outcomes they have delivered, and at what cost; including what outcomes are possible; which areas of public procurement offer the greatest potential for delivering policy outcomes, what environmental, social and competitiveness outcomes UK government should realistically be aiming to achieve and what actions need to taken by whom, to deliver the recommended aims.
Final report (EBCD1) (PDF 700 KB)
Summary review statement (EBCD1) (PDF 30 KB)
Page published: 23 January 2008