SCM Helps Campus Go Green and Save Some Green

Sandy Macasieb and Alex Butler

Supply Chain Management (SCM) at UC Berkeley has been working for several years to provide more tools to the campus to make better decisions about green purchasing. Strategic Sourcing's Sandy Macasieb and Alex Butler accepted the 2015 CACS Sustainability Award for efforts that range from researching new products to highlighting green products for buyers to focusing on waste-reduction efforts. 

Where applicable, SCM leverages the University’s purchasing power to target environmentally preferable products and services for volume-discounted pricing to make them cost-competitive with conventional products and services. This approach helps to encourage preferential purchases of such products including Energy Star equipment, recycled content products, and other third-party certified green items, along with providing some guidance to suppliers on minimizing packaging waste and developing take-back programs.

The impact of SCM's work also can clearly be seen in the data collected for the 2013 Sustainability Report: The campus purchased at least $14.4 million of environmentally preferable products last year. The increase – 60 percent in three years – is due to multiple factors, including better reporting from some vendors, the inclusion of more vendors who now flag green products, and also increased purchases due to staff efforts and engagement.

In a recent success story, Butler worked with Office Max to make 100 percent recycled content copy paper available, paper that costs less than Berkeley currently pays for only 30 percent recycled content. The impact? Every week UC Berkeley goes through a stack of paper taller than the Campanile, and every year it’s a stack over 16,000 feet tall. That's a lot of copy paper and a lot of savings. Butler also said the copy paper program will expand systemwide.