SPP Targets:

• From 2025, only zero emission and biogas vehicles are allowed for transport of goods and services in municipal contracts. The target also applies for vehicles and machines owned by the municipality.
• Require all zero emission construction sites by 2025.
• Increase the share of organic food in the city’s procurements to 50%.
• Reduce food waste in the municipality by 50% by 2030.
• Halve the meat consumption in Oslo Municipality's canteens and institutions, by the end of 2023.
• Increase the share of fairtrade-bananas to 70%, fairtrade-coffee to 30% and fairtrade-tea to 10%, by 2022.

Socially Responsible Procurement:

The City of Oslo takes active measures to promote international human rights and ensure that working conditions in the whole supply chain are at minimum in accordance with the Fundamental Human Rights, the ILO Core Conventions and relevant national labour regulations in producing countries. The city uses social criteria in all contracts where production processes imply risks of adverse impacts on international human rights and labour rights. The social criteria are included in the so-called Oslo Model which was revised in 2023 (Case study available, p. 72), with a strengthened focus on due diligence for responsible business conduct.

Sustainable and Circular Procurement:

Oslo is continuously improving its circular systems in order to make the most out of our resources. The City Council wishes to promote innovation and new jobs in the circular economy, and adopted «Strategy for a sustainable and circular consumption in Oslo (2019-2030)”. The strategy states that the municipality will facilitate a more sustainable consumption, where focus will shift from buying new to taking care of the things that are already in use; share, replace, upgrade, renew and repair. The strategy also emphasizes the importance of reducing material consumption through procurements, e.g. promote needs assessments, prioritize products that have components of recycled material, long lifetimes, warranty schemes, repair options, return schemes and recyclability.

The City of Oslo has good experience with the reuse of ICT equipment through a collaboration agreement with a work training company. Equipment is made available by the municipality free of charge, and enters a process where products suitable for reuse are upgraded if necessary, and spare parts can be selected before the remaining products is prepared for recycling. The collaboration agreement represents a triple bottom line. It contributes to the environment by keeping resources in the loop and reducing demand for new products, to the society by giving jobs to people falling outside of ordinary work life, and aims at providing functional and more affordable products to those who need them. The City has included a more repairable and environmentally friendly smartphone, which several of the City’s agencies has set as their standard model for work phones. The City has also increased its focus on supporting extended use time for phones and computers within the organization by working to make repairs and internal reuse easier. This is done through setting up internal reuse systems and services, and an increased focus on routines and circular practices.

In recent years, the City has increased its focus on facilitating more circular consumption patterns, in particular through its central framework agreements. For example, within furniture, where the City has  developed new contracts for redesign and repair of furniture. Soon, the City’s contract for the purchase of furniture will include the purchasing of used furniture. . To increase use-lifetime within important categories, the City has developed new contracts like repair of work shoes, repair of batteries in electric bicycles and a focus on repair of work wear. Through innovative procurement, the City is engaging start-ups to help support more circular thinking when different decision-makers, like users, procurers, and leaders, are making purchasing-related decisions on behalf of the city. That way we aim to connect the circular thinking in needs assessment with the development of circular options in central framework agreements.    

The City is focusing on reduced and smarter use of plastic. In the agreement for consumables, circular economy relevant award criteria were weighted by 70 %. The criteria concerned  ecolabels and the supplier’s ability to support reduced environmental impact of consumption. A different example is our agreement for medical consumables, in which the City has cooperated with the supplier to reduce the environmental impact of fossil plastic use. This has led to the testing of multi-use packaging with the potential to reduce tonnes of pallet plastic used in the deliveries to the City every year.

Throughout spring 2023 Oslo had a project with a StartOff-company to develop a prototype of a sharing platform for machines and equipment used in everyday maintenance of public schools. This include machines such as lawn mowers, grass trimmers and leaf blowers. Oslo has around 200 public schools and as of today, every school has their own machine fleet.

However, limited budgets, storage capacity and challenges with charging infrastructure means that a number of schools are not able to have a complete electric machine fleet that meets the schools’ needs for operation and maintenance. Oslo now explores the possibilities for more sharing between the schools using a digital platform. The goal is to have fewer machines and better maintenance, and still obtain the equivalent operation level as before.

Social and Ethical Procurement:

We consider the risk of violations of human and labour rights as high in many of the city's procurements of goods and services. Consequently, we incorporate social requirements in a majority of these procurements, including social selection criteria and standard contract clauses. The revised Oslo Model with standard requirements for suppliers' work with human
and labour rights was adopted in May 2023 with instructions and standard requirements for due diligence for responsible business conduct. The selection criteria ensures that our suppliers have a management system for labour and human rights issues.

At the contract management stage, we regularly follow up through reporting based on desktop research, follow-up meetings, documentation review and audits. We also regularly exchange with other public buyers and experts to address the systematic challenges in prioritized supply chains.

Based on risk, the prioritized categories in our citywide framework agreements are ICT equipment (mobiles, tablets and PCs); batteries (electric vehicles and ICT); food (fruits, vegetables, raw materials); medical equipment (disposable gloves); and textile (workwear). This means closer follow-up of contracts, collaboration with external experts and other public buyers (national and international) to address systematic challenges and criteria development. The City has set additional criteria for suppliers to undertake social dialogue at the production site in textile production and requirements to reduce the risk of conflict minerals in agreements on PCs and tablets.

The City of Oslo is the "Fairtrade capital" of Norway and became the first public player in Norway to offer garments made from fairtrade-certified cotton to the health sector through the joint venture agreement for washing and renting workwear and institutional clothing. Through our membership at Ethical Trade Norway, the City of Oslo wishes to signal a strengthened commitment to work for ethical trade through procurement. Our annual member report to Ethical Trade Norway 2022 is available at the Report Database at www.etiskhandel.no.

Labour Crime and Social Dumping:

The City of Oslo continues to be at the forefront in fighting social dumping, work related crime, and ensuring decent labour conditions for workers in our domestic and global supply chains. The model is a comprehensive framework of measures and requirements to help combat social dumping, and to promote decent working conditions, using public procurement as a strategic tool. More than 5 years have passed since the city adopted and introduced the first version of the"Oslo-model".

In 2023 the City of Oslo introduced a new and revised Oslo Model. Regarding domestic supply chains, the model now compiles more than 22 requirements, and applies in particular to high-risk industries such as construction and cleaning services, but also in other future high risk areas.

The changes in the model of 2023 are based on the city’s experience since 2017, and have both added and removed some of the provisions in the new model. A new provision is in regard to the contractors professional integrity - if the city has legitimate doubt about the professional integrity of the contractor or any subcontractors, or who the City of Oslo’s real contracting party is, the contractor is obliged, upon request, to provide relevant documentation showing that the contractor/subcontractor has not committed serious errors that may give rise to doubts about professional integrity and/or who is the real contracting party.

In addition the Oslo Model of 2023 have a heightened focus on contract management, and have instructions not only for the suppliers but also for the buyers in the city’s entities. It is a continuous work to further develop and implement the model.