Purchasing and Negotiation Training

Editor’s note: this is the Part III in a series of eight that will explore Sustainability and how green purchasing can and should take a leadership role. Part II deals with energy management  and Part I is an overview. 

In concert with the American Purchasing Society, I am developing a green procurement course that will have far more extensive material available in online, print, and portable digital media.  We will update quarterly so companies can build on successes.  We will offer discounts to those who sign up early so send me an email stating your interest and I’ll respond with particulars.

There is probably no Sustainability concept more familiar and understood by more people than the 3Rs of Reduce/Reuse/Recycle.  The 3Rs are primarily driven by the profit motive of cost reduction but the concurrent bonus benefit of Sustainability successes falls right into green purchasing’s wheelhouse. 

 Every business, no matter the industry, can benefit by participation in the 3Rs defined as follows: 

Reduce         to decrease waste and/or eliminate needless or inefficient use of resources.  If the need for a resource is reduced or eliminated, as in the related concepts of energy reduction and conservation, resources are preserved and financial gains almost accompany the effort. 

Reuse            to find similar or identical, new, and sometimes novel ways to use the same resource instead of disposing of it.  Eliminated new or replacement resources conserve and preserve and almost always come with accompanying financial gains. 

Recycle         to find other uses for waste materials including re-manufacturing into other products. Recycling materials like cans, glass, paper and cardboard recovers the valuable resources that would otherwise be waste to make new products. For example, glass bottles and jars collected by a recycling service will be cleaned, crushed and recycled into new bottles and jars.  

The cost savings of green procurement include waste minimization, elimination of collection, cartage, landfill usage, disposal, and the requisite energy otherwise needed to accomplish these gains.  Let’ demonstrate how this works. 

Common applications of 3Rs are packaging, paper, printing, pallets, scrap, and water.  Disposable packaging is rapidly being replaced by durable, reusable containers. Packaging of bottled water in corrugated boxes is being replaced by shrink wrap.  Even the bottles are thinner to increase net payload and reduce transportation costs.  Better yet, eliminating these plastic bottles entirely by using plumbed drinking fountains or large glass container drinking stations are all greener measures and are creditable towards a Sustainability profile.  

Click here for online or CD/print media versions of "Green Purchasing" course

Reusing incoming pallets to ship outgoing deliveries is a Sustainable practice that saves money.  So is recycling and refilling printer cartridges.  The same applies to baling and selling back of corrugated waste.  The ways to save money and go green through the 3Rs is limited only by purchasing’s imagination and creativity. 

Any business that uses paper has multiple opportunities to use green purchasing and save money.  If you have a copy machine, you have multiple opportunities to engage in the 3Rs.  Reducing the amount of paper and ink, printing on both sides, and recycling the waste paper all qualify as Sustainable measures. 

Here are a few interesting stats about paper but substitute other materials and similar stats would apply. 

• The U.S. catalog industry annually mails 19.5 billion catalogs, or 71 for every man, woman and child – producing and disposing 3.6 million tons of paper
• Producing recycled paper requires about 60 percent of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp  
• Manufacturing one ton of office paper from recycled stock can save between 3,000 and 4,000 kilowatt-hours more than if the same ton of paper were made with virgin wood products. 
  • For illustration of cost savings and using an arbitrary price $0.10/kWh, the savings per ton is $300 to $400. 
  • Using the 3.6 million tons of catalog paper, the total savings is a staggering $1.08 billion to $1.44 billion just for catalogs
• Recycling one ton of newspaper is equivalent to avoiding 2.5 tons of CO₂ emissions into the air
• Applying this 2.5 tons of CO₂ figure to the 3.6 million tons of catalogs means that about 9 million tons of CO₂ would be saved 

Applying the 3Rs to paper, raw material, packaging, and containers are rather routine, but how about the 3Rs applied to the #1 material consumed on earth, water?  Not surprisingly, it is also the #1 wasted material so great Sustainability and cost savings gains go hand in hand.  

Clearly, green procurement makes an enormous impact on cost savings and Sustainability.  Much larger contributors such as plastics and metals have not even been mentioned thus far but the illustrations above indicate that green procurement is the way to cut costs, raise profitability, and improve Sustainability. 

As we will see in Part IV, there are novel and ingenious ways to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle water.  Whether used for domestic, process, irrigation, fire protection, or even storm water reclamation purposes, water is the ultimate 3R material.