ABSTRACT
Changing production and consumption patterns is a focal point of environmental policies at both national and international level. On the consumption side, three different groups of consumers can roughly be distinguished: individuals, companies and governments. This chapter describes the development and application of environment-oriented public procurement in the Netherlands. It pays attentionto the relevance of public procurement as an instrument of environmental policy; the process of purchasing and tendering is then examined, followed by the regulatory scope for the greening of public procurement. The chapter focuses on a case study conducted by the Institute for Environmental Studies, a Dutch university research centre, in the framework of the European Union (EU) project 'Product Policy in Support of Environmental Policy', which inventoried product policy in the EU and its member states, and sketched future possibilities for environment-oriented product policy. Identifying greener products and services is a crucial aspect of greener public procurement.
