Sustainability Compass
Kompass Nachhaltigkeit (Sustainability Compass) shows municipal procurement officers the way through the jungle of quality standards and procurement guidelines, offers legal certainty in the implementation of sustainable procurement and provides numerous successfully implemented practical examples from cities, municipalities and districts.
Public procurement agencies spend around 500 billion euros per year throughout Germany - around 60 % of which is spent at the municipal level. Purchases include services and supplies such as food, workwear, vehicles, IT hardware, building cleaning and more. However, the production of goods and along their supply chains is often neither sustainable nor fair. Human rights violations due to exploitative work-ing conditions and irreparable damage to ecosystems still occur - mostly in the countries of the Global South. Municipalities can make a difference here by switching to socially and environmentally sustainable procurement and using their market power as leverage for better production conditions.
This is why the Sustainability Compass was launched in 2010. Commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Sustainability Compass is managed by the Service Agency Communities of One World in Cooperation (SKEW) in Cooperation together with the Deutsche Gesell-schaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).
Sustainable procurement with the Sustainability Compass
The Sustainability Compass provides local governments with valuable help and support in all phases of the procurement process. The compass provides basic knowledge through explanatory videos, online seminars and gives insight into the legal basis of procurement.
Quality labels are the central means, explicitly regulated by procurement law, for providing evidence in the public procurement of goods and services. The Gü-tezeichenfinder (Standard Comparison Tool) helps to find out which labels guaran-tee social and ecological sustainability standards for purchasing: from toilet paper to fire department uniforms to computer monitors. In doing so, the Standard Comparison Tool takes into account the specific need of awarding bodies to be able to select criteria individually and check the equivalence of quality labels. The evalua-tion methodology of the standards is based on the same criteria as those used on Siegelklarheit.
The Vergabetool (Procurement tool) helps with all preparatory decisions in the pro-curement process. In a sequence of a maximum of seven steps, the tool checks in which form social and ecological sustainability criteria can be included in the planned tender.
Learning from committed municipalities
In the Best Practice Map section, the Sustainability Compass collects and documents tender documents, service instructions and council resolutions from sustainable cities, municipalities and districts in which ecological and social standards were important building blocks in the procurement process. With the help of individual filter functions and an interactive map, useful documents are made available.
Strategic planning and monitoring of sustainable procurement
The Mein Kompass login area enables the use of tools to create a strategy for im-plementing sustainable procurement and to record and comprehensively evaluate the implementation status.