Prioritizing procurement categories in Vietnam

After the approval of its National Green Growth Strategy in 2012, Vietnam applied a prioritization tool to public procurement in 2015 to select product categories where to focus SPP efforts, with the assistance of UNEP. As the first step of the prioritizing exercise, a list of preliminary procurement categories was created. This list included all the products for which the European Union’s (EU) has developed GPP criteria. A series of factors were taken into account in order to prioritize procurement categories, including the availability of Vietnam’s own national ecolabel Green Label. Then a scoring methodology was defined: products with no ecolabel were excluded; those which had a national ecolabel were scored with 2 points; and those with an equivalent international ecolabel 1 point. In the end four products were selected: office paper, laptops, fluorescent lamps, and LEDs lights.