1 The (Im)Possibility of Green Purchasing on the Smith Campus: Limiting Consumption, Considering Means of Production, and Understanding Smith’s Institutional Environmental Impact Mandi Norton-Westbrook EVS 300 Final Project Smith College May 10, 20072 ABSTRACT This paper considers the potential adoption of a green purchasing policy for the Smith campus. Specifically, it looks at the work of the Committee on Sustainability (COS) and its proposed policy from Spring 2007. My research consists of quantitative and qualitative research, including a quantitative study of green alternative office products for the Science Center, interviews and meetings with a variety of community members, research about other green purchasing policies, and my own participation on the COS subcommittee on green purchasing. Drawing on these sources, my research reveals several considerations for the adoption of a green purchasing policy: a decentralized system of purchasing, the need for administrative support, product consistency and quality, the development of a sustainability criteria, infrastructural reinforcement, and cost. These considerations were used to construct a plan of action as to how the college can purchase in a more sustainable fashion. The college will need to conduct a baseline study of its purchasing in different departments, run campaigns that alert the community to our purchasing decisions and environmental impacts, and critically think about means of reducing our consumption. The first step to such a plan would be the implementation of the work-study program suggested by the COS to the administration. INTRODUCTION A History of Green Purchasing Green purchasing arose within the environmental movement as a means of converting consumption into a location of political potential and action. Green purchasing borrows language and a conceptualization of consumption and environmental degradation from two different sectors of the environmental movement: environmental preferential purchasing (EPP) and green consumerism. In order to understand the way in which green purchasing has entered the political conversation on the Smith campus, I will outline a brief history of the EPP and green consumer movements. EPP standards emerged during the 1990s as different governmental entities came to examine their purchasing decisions’ environmental impacts. On a federal level, environmental-preferential purchasing grew out the October 20, 1993 Executive Order 12873, “Federal Acquisition, Recycling, and Waste Prevention,” and September 14, 19983 Executive Order 13101, “Greening the Government Through Waste Prevention, Recycling, and Federal Acquisition” (EPA, 12). EPP guidelines are an expansion of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines (CPG) program for the federal government’s “buy-recycled” program. EPP guidelines are defined in the following way by the EPA: “EPP means selecting ‘products or services that have a lesser or reduced effect on human health and the environment when compared with competing products or services that serve the same purpose.’” (EPA, 12). The EPA generated EPP standards as a guide to how government institutions can make economically-sensical and environmentally-aware decisions. To date, EPP standards have been adopted by many different municipalities and serve as models to understand how Smith can decrease its environmental impact via purchasing decisions. Furthermore, EPP standards have created an infrastructure, such as vendor fairs, contracts, and industry standards, which Smith could potentially utilize. Parallel to this change in governmental purchasing procedures, the green consumer movement began. The green consumer movement stresses the power individuals have in their individual consumer choices. Historically, green consumerism attracts an upper middle class with a disposable income (Gardyn, 31). The ease and corresponding dependence on a hegemonic culture of consumerism serve as points of both attraction to and criticism of buying green. The questionability of consumerism as a form of political participation highlights the contradictory construction of green consumption that Smith should be aware of in its pursuit of a green purchasing policy. Consumption itself is a use of resources and Smith should be wary of succumbing to a “green-washed” image of sustainability that only4 commodifies sustainability as a catch-all phrase and does little to nothing to affect Smith’s environmental footprint (Anderson, 292). The following quote from scholar, Robert D. Sack, illustrates the pacifying capabilities of using consumption as a form of political action. Consumption is more of a hybrid language than most. It borrows material and forms of expressions from anywhere and everywhere, but its primary rhetorical device is indirection. We have said products promise to create contexts, to link individuals to groups, and to communicate meanings (Sack 658). Sack and other academics, such as Jennifer Price and Matthew Klingle, alert us to the danger of failing to make the connection between consumer culture and its use of natural materials in production. However, despite (or perhaps including these criticisms), green purchasing has come to be a model for educational institutions that fit neither model of environmentally-aware consumption (EPP guidelines and the green consumerism movement). Green purchasing provides guidelines for institutional purchasing decisions in a way that applies the decision-making guidelines of EPP to smaller scale institutions that are too large to fit within the parameters of being individual green consumers. Green Purchasing on the Smith Campus The issue of green purchasing presents three questions with which this report will engage. (1) How can Smith buy more sustainable products? What factors should be taken into account in identifying sustainable products? (2) How could Smith be more efficient in its use of resources through its consumption? (3) After parameters have been set for a policy, what are the best means of implementation?5 I became interested in this project after I joined the Committee on Sustainability (COS) in the Fall of 2006. Through my participation on the committee and my prior environmental work on the Smith campus, I began to consider the means through which Smith could come to think critically about its institutional role in