European municipalities procure services and goods on a large scale, as they are responsible for various public facilities in the fields of child and elderly care, construction, education, or traffic. For this reason, they have great potential to use the procurement process to achieve environmental goals. Green Public Procurement (GPP) can stimulate demand for more sustainable services and goods, thus promoting a regenerative circular economy and helping to support a toxic-free environment. Another benefit: financial savings for the public sector can also be achieved when the purchasing patterns are investigated more thoroughly.

On a positive note, several municipalities in the European Union have already started to develop Green Public Procurement (GPP) schemes. However, many of them are still in the early stages of this process and face various challenges, ranging from a lack of management support to a lack of knowledge in the organisation – concerning everything from market dialogues and requirements in the municipal units to selection of criteria and follow up processes. One of the greatest difficulties is the lack of a holistic approach: procurement managers often focus on individual goals such as climate neutrality or circularity while the topic of avoiding hazardous substances in the procured services and goods often recieve too little attention.

And this is exactly where ChemClimCircle comes in: It combines the topics of chemicals, climate and circularity and provides supportive material for municipalities to further develop their procurement strategy. The solution is to consider all three aspects already in the planning phase of a procurement and to create an organisational structure that makes it possible to include more than just one sustainability goal in the procurement process.

Specifically, the ChemClimCircle approach provides soultions for inclusion of sustainability aspects on the following levels:

• Strategic level – an overarching strategy which needs to include goals for the specific organisation set on political level, that supports the application of inclusive procurement criteria.
• Operational level – procurement process structure and sustainability coordination in the municipality as implementation of political goals, and setting the strategy for the organisation.
• Procurement level – the ChemClimCircle approach provides a matrix for prioritizations of a procurement practices connected to sustainability aspects that incorporates tox-free, climate-neutral, and circular criteria into the process.

The City of Stockholm acted as a forerunner in the project since it has both a Chemicals centre, a Centre for circularity and climate experts at The Environment and Health Department, involving and integrating these expert functions was a success factor in the implementation of the ChemClimCircle approach in procurement processes. Thanks to the Interreg support, the ChemClimCircle approach was elaborated during this small project, both locally within all partner municipality organisations as well as discussed and developed together with the other project partners and associated organisations. The ChemClimCircle Guidance and Training material, Process structure, Sustainability coordination and Roadmap can now be used effectively and implemented in organisations beyond the project, and provides a clear way of spreading the message of the ChemClimCircle approach.