The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), with a grant from the US EPA, has developed a free and open source tool to support Green Procurement (GP). This tool enables you to prioritize and to estimate benefits of your Green Purchasing. It uses the methods and data of Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

To obtain a copy of the tool, simply register in the site, then log in and click on “Download Software”. From that page you can download the tool as well as a PDF of the Users Manual.

In addition to being available at no cost, this tool is in the “Open Source.” That means that the source code of the tool is also freely available, (it is a model built in the software “Analytica” from Lumina Decision Systems ) so that others can make enhancements and improvements. Developers could, for example, import and use LCA data from other countries or regions. They could add additional life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods, and any number of other enhancements that they or other users dream up. The only requirement of this tool’s Open Source license is that enhanced versions are also available in the Open Source and at no cost.

This website also hosts a threaded discussion forum for users and co-developers to share ideas and questions about Green Purchasing prioritization and benefits assessment. We hope that this forum will be a useful resource for the Green Purchasing community. Many thanks to the global team of beta testers, for helping to make this free resource more powerful and useful on behalf of green and sustainable purchasing around the world.