Public administrations in Spain are obliged to develop procurement projects within the framework of green public procurement.

Public administrations in Spain are obliged to develop procurement projects within the framework of green public procurement.

It is a point contemplated in both the Spanish Strategy for Sustainable Development and the European Strategy for Sustainable Development and which has found a specific development in Spanish public procurement legislation. At the local level, the Regional Sustainability Strategies and the local Agenda 21 reinforce this process.

The “Entrepreneurship and Green Public Procurement” project aims to unite green entrepreneurs with the different administrations, through green public procurement, promoting, on the one hand, the creation of green companies and jobs and, on the other, economic savings, environmental sustainability and social responsibility in the field of public administrations.

This initiative will explore the sources of employment that will be generated by the application of the green public procurement mandates under which public administrations are framed. These mandates will encourage a demand for certain types of services that, in many cases by their very nature, are carried out by SMEs and will favour entrepreneurship.

Cases such as the calculation of the Carbon Footprint, energy audits or the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to smart grids are good examples of this type of employment sources that, in addition, represent an improvement in efficiency, and therefore, favor savings for public administrations.

The project will also have a training phase for entrepreneurs, which after previous studies and through the dissemination of the results of the initiative, will aim to promote the creation of companies aimed at offering sustainable goods and services related to green public procurement.

The recipients are all those workers linked to the autonomous communities of Andalusia, Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha who are suffering from unemployment due to the current crisis and who are related to the environmental sector. In these communities there is a clear need to generate projects that improve the quality of life in their areas and that allow the arrival of resources to the area. It is also important that the exploitation of these resources allows the reconciliation of work and social life.

Among the recipients are three main typologies:

• Entrepreneurs of green services to production that generate a new economic fabric of entrepreneurs.
• Environmental consultancies that want to develop carbon footprint measurement projects, energy audits and ICT development.
• Entrepreneurs belonging to sectors of the brown economy who want to reconvert their activity towards sectors of the green economy or develop new lines of business within it.

The results that will be achieved with the project are:

• Training of 90 recipients, although the initiative will reach 1,390 workers.
• Generation of between 12 and 14 new entrepreneurs or new lines of business within the framework of the green economy.