Capital city Oslo is the economic hub of Norway, and its ambition to be a green, inclusive and smart city has also made it a champion of sustainable procurement. The city has been pursuing sustainable procurement actions for many years, and has placed a particular focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing responsible and circular purchasing, and increasing the share of sustainable food.
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Geir Rossebø
Coordinator Sustainable Procurement
More information? Email procurement@iclei.org
Oslo aims at being a leader in using public procurement as a strategic tool to achieve our sustainability and climate goals. The city’s Procurement Strategy from 2017 shows a reinforced commitment to sustainable procurement. The main goal of the strategy is the delivery of good and socially responsible solutions in both the short and long term, which are appropriate and cost-efficient.
The Procurement Strategy has four sub-targets, which seek to ensure that Oslo's procurement effectively contributes to providing citizens and businesses with solutions and services in line with current and future needs, as well as make Oslo greener, more socially inclusive and fair, and a smarter and more innovative city.
The Strategy is also aligned with Oslo's Climate Budget, which was adopted after the Paris Agreement. The Climate Budget includes measures quantifying the emission cuts needed by 2030, and integrates these into the Financial Budget.
As a participant in the Global Lead City Network on Sustainable Procurement, Oslo has committed to leading by example globally on SPP.
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 is included in the latest regulation adopted in 2017, known as the Oslo Model (Case study available, p. 72).
Oslo is continuously improving its circular systems in order to make the most out of our resources. The City administration wishes to promote innovation and new jobs in the circular economy. The City Council adopted "Strategy for a sustainable and circular consumption in Oslo (2019-2030)" in December 2019. The strategy states that the municipality will facilitate a more sustainable consumption, where the 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 procurement, by e.g. to promote needs assessments, and to 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 re-use of ICT equipment through a collaboration agreement with a work training company. Equipment is made available by the municipality free of charge, and goes through a process where products suitable for reuse are upgraded if necessary, and spare parts can be selected before the remaining products are 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, for instance schools and youth centres. The City has also increased its focus on supporting extended use time for phones and computers by working to make repairs and internal reuse easier through routines and circular practices.
In recent years, the City has increased its focus on facilitating consumption that is more circular through central framework agreements and focus on circular economy in needs assessment. For example within furniture, where the City has made new contracts for redesign and repair of furniture, refurbishment of furniture and soon used furniture as well as sales and reuse of 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 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, the criteria for ecolabels and the supplier’s ability to support reduced environmental impact of consumption through the contract was weighted 70%. 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.
Many of the City of Oslo’s contracts involves thousands of products manufactured all around the world. To promote human rights and ILO core conventions through Oslo’s procurements of goods, we set social selection criteria and standard contract clauses using Oslo's standard social criteria, adopted by the City Council in 2017. The selection criteria ensures that our suppliers have a management system for labour and human rights issues, and a system for traceability. The city uses social criteria in all contracts where production processes imply risks of adverse impacts on international human rights and labour rights.
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 on the City’s citywide framework agreements are ICT (mobiles, tablets and PC’s), food, medical equipment and textile. This means closer follow-up of contracts, collaboration with external experts and other public buyers 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 2019 is available at the Report Database at www.etiskhandel.no
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. More than 3 years have passed since the city adopted and introduced the first version of the "Oslo-model". 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. It is a continuous work to further develop and implement the model.
Regarding domestic supply chains, the model compiles more than 20 requirements, and applies in particular to high-risk industries such as construction and cleaning services.
The City of Oslo has, by public procurement, established the first pilot of a zero emission construction site operated by zero emission machinery only. To initiate market development, there has been organised a broad dialogue with stakeholders aiming at developing a market for zero emission construction vehicles and machinery.
The pilot has been a success, showing zero emission construction to be possible, with relatively low additional costs. From 2025, all construction sites commissioned by the city of Oslo are to be zero emission. Now, we are moving from pilot projects to roll-out: In 2022, about 80% of water and wastewater construction sites in the city of Oslo are operating on zero emission construction machines. We have seen a shift in this sector from 100% fossil-fuel to near zero emission in only three years.
Reducing indirect emissions related to building materials is also an important focus area for the City of Oslo. Several pilots test requirements for recycled as well as low carbon materials. The City Council has established a quantitative target for reducing climate gas emissions related to the climate footprint from the use of materials in buildings.
In recent years, Oslo has worked systematically to organize policies and work with sustainable and healthy food, and political guidelines for Oslo’s food policy set high demands and goals.
The most central guidelines for this work are as follows:
The responsibility for implementing sustainable and healthy food in Oslo is placed with the Vice Mayor of Finance. The executive body is the Agency for Improvement and Development. The city is preparing a government proposition with the purpose to achieve the city council's ambitions for sustainable and healthy food. The City Council presents strategic priorities in the municipality’s food policy and an action plan with concrete measures to promote sustainable and healthy food in Norway. The City Government proposition also provides suggestions for organizing the food area to ensure sufficient implementation of the guidelines.
New city-wide framework agreements on food
From the beginning of 2023, new suppliers must deliver more sustainable plant-based and seasonal foods. The city is continuously working on how to develop its portfolio of framework agreements, as well as assortment management, to make sustainable alternatives a simple and affordable choice. In addition, the city is focusing on training and other initiatives that lead to more sustainable food consumption.
A survey of the requirements for emission-free building and construction sites
Signatory of the Circular Cities Declaration - CCD
Portraits - Ethical Procurement of ICT
Climate and Environmental Requirements for Transport in Procurements
Oslo Green Capital Overview Document
Climate Strategy for Oslo towards 2030
Standard requirements for zero emission construction sites
Strategy for a sustainable and circular consumption in Oslo (only in Norwegian)
Action Plan to Reduce Plastic Pollution in the Oslo Fjord 2019-2020
Framework Agreement for zero emission vehicles
Case study: Pilot for zero emission construction site
Case study: Renewable heating systems for schools
Case study: Cooperation on including social responsibility in contracts
BuyZET: Oslo Procurement Plan for zero emission transport
BuyZET: Oslo Gren Public Procurement Guidance
BuyZET: Market Engagement Report: Maintenance and Service and Facility Waste
Procurement of innovative solutions for zero emission urban delivery of goods and services
Accelerating implementation of procurement innovation.
For further information on the activities of Oslo visit their website:
or email procurement@iclei.org