FEE Addresses Biobased Products Forum, Expresses High Hopes for Growing the Federal Use of Biobased Products

On October 8, 2002, Federal Environmental Executive John Howard provided one of the keynote addresses to the Stakeholders' Forum on Growing the Federal Use of Biobased Products, in Washington, D.C. This first-ever forum featured remarks by White House Agriculture Policy Advisor Chuck Conner, Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Jim Moseley, Department of Energy Assistant Secretary David Garman, Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Angela Styles, and EPA Administrator ChristineTodd Whitman.

The event was sponsored by the United Soybean Board, the American Soybean Association, the National Corn Growers, the National Association of State Directors of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of the Federal Environmental Executive, Cargill Dow LLC, DuPont, Cargill, Universal Textile Technologies, Biotechnology Industry Organization, and EarthShell Packaging.

For more information on the forum, please see www.unitedsoybean.org.

Promoting the Federal government's purchase of "green" products, including biobased products, is one of the Office of the Federal Environmental Executive's six priorities.

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Thank you. Our office is very pleased to help sponsor this important forum. This morning's discussion was a great start.

We're here because we all want to increase the creation and purchasing of biobased products.

Some of you may know, but I've had the privilege of working for the President for more than 6 years on these and other issues. And for at least 6 years he's been saying, "Every day is Earth Day for farmers and ranchers and those who make their living on the land."

When he was Governor, he worked with Agriculture Directors like Susan Combs - and with the current governor, who used to be the Agriculture Director, Rick Perry - to boost value-added agricultural production. He even joined Nolan Ryan and other famous Texans in pitching the "Go Texan" agricultural product marketing program.

In his new job, President Bush has called on us to ensure that the Federal government leads by example, is a good neighbor, and is a good steward of our resources. One of the best ways that we can create better and more sustainable markets for our farmers and be better environmental stewards is to use our purchasing power to buy products made with biobased materials. Not to mention that biobased products also can be good for national security, energy, health, and economic reasons, as others have noted throughout this morning.

So where are we today?

We've had several good policies along the way to promote the purchase of biobased products. We had a biobased executive order a few years ago that laid a good foundation, E.O. 13134, and we've had several laws that required agencies to do a better job of researching and coordinating.

EPA has issued some comprehensive procurement guidelines (CPGs) for some biobased products. As you heard this morning from the panelists, the Department of the Interior and others have led the Federal government's efforts to test and use biobased products, such as cleaning materials. The Postal Service uses soy-based inks and biobased adhesives in many of its stamps.

The President's Green Chemistry Challenge Awards have recognized the biobased polymer research of one of this event's sponsors, Cargill-Dow. The Federal government's purchases of ethanol, biodiesel and other alternative fuels tripled last year. And there are many other examples.

But we know we haven't done all we can.

That's why President Bush was pleased to sign the new Farm Bill, which contained such provisions as $3.5 billion in annual conservation spending and a directive that the Federal government should be buying biobased products.

And we still have high hopes that the conference committee, meeting today, will iron out their differences and send the President a strong energy bill that also promotes the use of biobased products.

The role of the Federal Environmental Executive.

So what is the Federal Environmental Executive? My kids call me the "recycling king" - that was the first role for this office when it was known as the Federal Recycling Executive in the first Bush Administration. In the Clinton Administration, they added the significant role of boosting the federal government's purchasing of green products. In the new Bush Administration, we have continued that evolutionary path and now have added a few other, related priorities.

Before I go too far, I want to introduce two folks from my office who are our experts on green procurement and biobased products, Dana Arnold and Julie Winters (please stand). They're doing a great job, and I encourage you to contact them and check out their work on our website: www.ofee.gov.

Our new mission is "to promote sustainable environmental stewardship throughout the federal government." That's a broad mandate, so to ensure we stay focused we have identified six priorities.

We will continue focusing on how the federal government can improve its recycling and purchasing of green products, including biobased products. We also are working on boosting the federal government's sustainable building practices, improving its stewardship of electronic products, and promoting the implementation of industrial ecology. And to pull all of these together in a strategic framework, we are actively promoting the use of environmental management systems, as tools to ensure that the federal government is complying with the law, is incorporating environmental considerations in its daily and long-term decisionmaking, and is starting to develop sustainable practices.

Why is our office so particularly interested in biobased products?

We view the new biobased products program as a confluence of several of our green purchasing efforts, including:

our buy-recycled program,
our environmentally preferable purchasing program,
our waste minimization and pollution prevention projects,
the work we've done to green Federal acquisition policies and procedures,
our efforts to promote sustainable building practices, and
our work to promote effective green labeling.

It gives us the rare opportunity of a congressional mandate lining up with a presidential directive to see how we as the Federal government, with our significant purchasing power, can do a few things better - and then maybe do a few other things better, and keep moving forward in a positive direction.

I believe that our various green product programs - biobased, energy efficiency, water conservation, recycled content, environmentally preferable, and renewable fuels - are mature enough that we now should integrate them - not to remove their individual identities or take them out of their agency homes, but to bring the programs and officials together to strategize, to share successes and failures, and to build common strength. Because in the end, our job is to make it as easy as possible for purchasers to purchase these goods, and all our energies should be focused on that task.

That's why we're excited by EPA's idea to host at the end of next year a Green Products Trade Fair featuring the range of green products, including biobased products. The idea is to bring together vendors and the federal purchasing community so that, as you have done today, people can see and touch the products and ask all the questions they have about a product's performance and quality and cost. We hope that you will participate.

So what is our office doing with biobased products?

You've heard from several federal officials already, and you'll hear from others still, about what all they are doing, individually and collectively. So I'll just focus on what we're doing.

In the world of biobased products, we have several roles. We bring together agencies in an interagency process. We provide training and education. And we provide the useful accountability tool of reporting.

Today, I'm very optimistic that we can turn all this work into a success, one on par with EPA and DOE's Energy Star program. Energy Star started out with a few products and just targeted federal purchasers. Today, it covers a multitude of products, is widely purchased by the federal government, and is now well recognized and being purchased by American consumers. We can do that with biobased products, too. And we're starting in a better position with biobased products than we did with any of the other green products we've worked on before.

We're working with USDA and its interagency team in the development of the biobased products Federal Register notice. And we're looking forward to continuing that relationship in assisting USDA and the Federal agencies to implement section 9002 of the Farm Bill.

We're active participants in the Buy Bio workgroup. I want to thank Linda Mesaros and her team for the great job they are doing with this new group. Under the Department of Energy's leadership and Argonne National Laboratory's management, the Buy Bio Workgroup is doing a great job of bringing together agency staffs, assessing exactly what is needed to promote the purchase and use of biobased products, developing training and outreach materials, engaging private sector partners, identifying opportunities for biobased product pilot, and gathering case studies.

And I've just been invited to participate as a member of the Biomass R&D; board, which you heard David Garman discuss earlier.

We've worked to educate federal officials about biobased products by featuring biobased products in our quarterly newsletter, Closing the Circle News - and through training sessions for procurement officials and for credit card holders. You've heard how the USDA Beltsville Agriculture Research Center won one of our Closing the Circle Awards. Each year, we honor the best and most innovative federal environmental stewards at a White House ceremony, and this year we added a category featuring biobased products. Our PowerPoint training, our newsletters, and information about Closing the Circle Award winners are all up on our website, www.ofee.gov.

We will be working with USDA and OFPP to revise the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) to implement section 9002 of the Farm Bill.

Once USDA completes its designations of biobased products, we will be assisting in the effort to:

educate agencies about biobased products,
identify and resolve technical concerns,
identify biobased products available from the Federal sources of supply,
encourage the sources of supply to increase the availability of biobased products, and
work with vendors of biobased products.

We will also gather case studies of Federal agency use of biobased products to post on our web site, which we're in the process of updating so we can make it easier to use and provide more helpful information.

Reporting

Our office also has an important role in assisting the President in measuring for results. Under the various "greening the government" executive orders, statutes, and the President's Management Agenda, we're working to ensure that we do a better job measuring how we're doing, so we'll know better what works and what doesn't work.

For example, in just a few weeks, we'll be completing a biennial report to the President on how the federal government is doing in implementing the various "greening the government" environmental, energy, and transportation executive orders.

One of the difficulties we face is tracking what products federal officials purchase and whether they were recycled content or energy efficient or biobased. So one of the tasks we've been working on is to improve this tracking capability. And we'd like your help and thoughts on developing metrics and tracking tools for biobased products.

Closing

While our job is to work with Federal agencies to promote purchasing of biobased products, it also is our job to assist product manufacturers and vendors to sell their products to the Federal government.

We look forward to partnering with you to make this program effective so that America's farmers - and their families and their communities - can continue to be strong and healthy, both today and in future generations.