Environmentally Preferable Purchasing
Executive Order 13101 defines "environmentally preferable" as "products or services that have a lesser or reduced effect on human health and the environment when compared with competing products or services that serve the same purpose. This comparison may consider raw materials acquisition, production, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, reuse, operation, maintenance, or disposal of the product or service."

Environmentally preferable purchasing requires the identification of environmental attributes pertinent to a product or service and the acquisition of a product or service with those attributes. Whereas acquisition of most "green" products looks at a single attribute (e.g., percentage of recycled content, level of energy efficiency), acquisition of environmentally preferable products or services can look at multiple attributes (e.g., recycled content plus no or low emissions of volatile organic compounds). This allows the purchasing agency to tailor its acquisitions to the key environmental attributes relevant to its needs. Thus, for example, water-efficiency might be more important to a facility in the Southwest than to a facility located in other parts of the U.S.

EPA established five guiding principles for environmentally preferable purchasing. Agencies are encouraged to use these principles in conducting pilot acquisitions of environmentally preferable products or services. To date, Federal agencies have conducted more than 30 pilots, ranging from renovation of the Pentagon parking lot and building construction to acquisition of janitorial products or services to the identification of environmentally preferable paints, uniforms, and copier paper. The guiding principles, summaries of the pilots, products and specification information, and an EPP tutorial can be found on EPA's EPP web site, www.epa.gov/epp.

EPA Issues Final Guidance on EPP.