Businesses purchase a lot of supplies that can contribute to waste and litter, or alternatively, drive environmental innovation and stewardship. Purchasing environmentally preferable products can be a cost-effective way to reduce facilities’ impact on the environment. It promotes:

• Conserving energy and water
• Reducing the generation of hazardous waste
• Using nonhazardous, recovered and biobased materials
• Recognizing life-cycle cost savings

Benefits

Green products are often competitively priced and perform as well or better than conventional products, and in many cases can be purchased at a discount. Buying recycled products limits pollution by encouraging manufacturing processes that limit resource use and energy waste and keeps material out of our landfills, extending the amount of time a landfill can collect waste. Recycled products may also require less energy to produce. For example, producing recycled paper requires approximately 40 percent less energy than making paper from virgin material.

What are recycled goods and products?

• Recycled goods and products contain recycled content in place of a raw material. 
• Recycled content can be either post- or pre-consumer. Post-consumer means the material has been used by the consumer and was collected for reprocessing. Pre-consumer refers to material that was removed from the waste stream during manufacturing.

What is a climate positive product?

• A climate positive product has a negative carbon footprint, meaning the product or company removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits during production.

Resources for environmentally preferable purchasing

• To make navigating ecolabels easier, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed a list to help purchasers efficiently and effectively identify environmentally sustainable products and services. Examples include Safer Choice, ENERGY STAR and WaterSense.
• EPA's Sustainable Materials Management Comprehensive Procurement Guideline Program promotes the use of materials recovered from solid waste, and includes accompanying recommendations for recovered content, both post-consumer material content and/or total recovered material content.
• EPA created the Recycled Content (ReCon) Tool to help companies and individuals estimate life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions and energy impacts from purchasing and/or manufacturing materials with varying degrees of post-consumer recycled content.