Around the holidays I tagged a post from Green Daily to read later. It’s about local governments offering financial incentives to individuals for environmental practices. I love the idea, but there’s a nagging part of me that questions the ethics of what amounts to a tax on people who can’t afford to go green. Everyone pays into the pool of government funding via regular taxes, but only the people who can afford to make environmentally-preferable choices reap any financial benefit.

It seems to me to make more sense to spend money incenting big businesses to go green. First, a large company has more resources than a single individual, and second, companies are likely to have a faster impact on the market for green products and services than individuals. Luckily, in a lot of ways this is already happening – not necessarily in the form of financial give-backs, but in the form of government procurement policies that favor green vendors over non-green ones.

For example, the United States Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) green procurement policy requires that green products or services must be considered “as the first choice in ALL procurements,” and green purchasing is required in the areas of office products, printing services, fleet vehicles, building construction/maintenance, traffic control, park and recreation, appliances and lighting. If you’re selling to the DOD, you have a major financial incentive to go green.

Posted by Mari in Procurement