This month Seattle won the 2022 Electronics Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Purchaser Award, which is determined by the Global Electronics Council (GEC), a nonprofit group that promotes environmentally responsible purchasing. There's a long list of tech purchases that apply here, including familiar things like computers, monitors, mobile phones, printers and copiers, as well as more complex purchases such as photovoltaic modules and inverters.
To win the award, Seattle had to incorporate a set of EPEAT standards into its purchasing contracts, subsequently requiring vendors to meet a set of strict sustainability criteria. Officials involved in this work with the city said that this has to do with how technology is made, primarily, as well as how energy efficient it ultimately is when it is put into use. It also considers whether tech is recyclable when it is later discarded, whether it contains toxins and whether the labor practices that created it were ethical.
Larry Garcia is a senior environmental analyst with Seattle City Light, a long-tenured not-for-profit utility company that has operated with environmental sustainability in mind since its inception. Garcia said that the easiest way for a large tech-purchasing organization — like a city government, for example — to ensure that they're buying sustainable products is to use a third-party certification such as EPEAT.
Some of the qualities that have motivated Seattle to choose EPEAT as its environmental benchmark system is that it's rigorous, and also that it continues to evolve right alongside technology, making changes to address new developments.
Jason Edens is a senior contracting adviser with Seattle IT, and he said embracing this certification and striving for this award is in keeping with Seattle's longtime commitment to the environment, driven in part by the community.
"There's an expectation, I think, among our constituents that the city of Seattle will be forward-leaning in anything that speaks to an environmental concern," Edens said.
This particular effort to incorporate sustainability into procurement and purchasing actually started offline, with the way that the city buys textiles, including uniforms for fire fighters, police and other city workers, particularly the goal the city now uses throughout its purchasing to only buy products created with fair labor.
And these efforts are not just limited to Seattle. Edens and Garcia said that the city has shared its purchasing practices and even specific contract language with a number of other agencies in the local government space, especially regionally, collaborating on this with a range of partners, from nearby King County, Wash., to its Pacific Northwest neighbor, Portland, Ore.
Environmental concern aside, adhering to the EPEAT standard also is projected to save the city money through things like conserving power usage and having longer life cycles. In fact, in bestowing this award upon Seattle, EPEAT stakeholders noted that the city now stands to save $178,962 annually as a result of sustainable purchasing.
Seattle has previously won this EPEAT award in 2016, 2018 and 2019, with 2015 being the first year that the award was ever issued.
