Premier Jiang Yi-huah today applauded the country's achievements in promoting green procurement and directed the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to incorporate more foresight into planning green policies and concrete measures to meet national targets of carbon reduction in line with global trends in green trade and green procurement.
Premier Jiang's direction came after the EPA's report on the government's green procurement in 2013. Taiwan has promoted government green procurement for 12 years, and while results have been encouraging, a few local authorities—mostly in remote areas and offshore islands—still failed to meet yearly targets last year. Jiang attributed this performance discrepancy to insufficient information access and lack of familiarity with the scheme's report mechanism and demanded the EPA to provide guidance and assistance to these authorities for better implementation.
The premier also asked the EPA to actively encourage more private businesses and organizations to put green procurement into practice in order to expand green consumption. It is hoped that after the government leads the way, this effort will spread to the general public.
Taiwan is the world's first country to enact regulations for green procurement in the public sector; a program approved by the Executive Yuan in 2001 mandates that ministries and local authorities give preference to eco-friendly products when making procurements, EPA officials said.
According to the EPA, the public sector spent NT$6.76 billion (US$227 million) purchasing green products in 2013, which accounted for 96.1 percent of the total procurement of specified items. This was the equivalent of saving about 7.47 million trees, 1,707 kilowatt-hours of energy and 840,000 tons of water and reducing CO2 emissions by 11,268 tons. In addition, government support encouraged private businesses and groups as well as the general public to purchase green products totaling NT$59.64 billion (US$2 billion), 9.8 times the public sector's spending. This shows that citizens have integrated eco-friendly concepts into their buying habits, officials said.