On 9 September 2026, the European Commission adopted its proposal for a new Public Procurement Act – a sweeping regulation that will replace the three existing procurement directives with a single, directly applicable rulebook. Public procurement is not a niche topic: it covers roughly 15% of the EU's GDP, shaping everything from the buses cities buy to the meals served in school canteens.

The proposal seeks to move public procurement further away from a predominantly price-focused approach and towards obtaining the “best quality for money”, with environmental and climate considerations explicitly incorporated into the framework.

Quality Finally Outweighs Price

For decades, "lowest price wins" has been the default logic of public tenders, often at the expense of durability, sustainability or long-term value. The new Regulation changes that starting point.

Public contracts will, as a general rule, be awarded on the basis of the Best Price-Quality Ratio (BPQR), with a mandatory minimum quality weighting of 30% – rising to 50% for labour-intensive contracts. Quality criteria explicitly include environmental, social, innovation and resilience considerations, alongside life-cycle costing.

Buyers can still deviate from this weighting, but only under a "comply or explain" mechanism: they must justify how quality will otherwise be guaranteed, for instance through minimum specifications. It's a modest but meaningful nudge away from a system where the cheapest bid almost always won, regardless of its environmental footprint.

A Dedicated Legal Basis for "Green Public Procurement"

Beyond abstract sustainability targets, the draft regulation establishes a dedicated chapter on Green Public Procurement (GPP) that provides public buyers with actionable, legally sound instruments:  

• Circularity and Resource Efficiency (Article 51): Buyers are given clear cover to specify requirements regarding product durability, reparability, remanufactured components, recycled content, and waste prevention. It also legitimises "product-as-a-service," leasing, and sharing business models over outright asset purchases.  
• True Cost Accounting via Life-Cycle Costing (Article 99): The framework modernises life-cycle costing (LCC) by encouraging the monetization of environmental externalities, including greenhouse gas emissions and pollutant profiles generated during extraction, transport, use, and end-of-life phases.  
• High-Ambition Ecolabels (Article 91): Where environmental performance claims are made, buyers must prioritize third-party verified, life-cycle schemes, establishing the EU Ecolabel as the primary benchmark where official criteria exist.  
• Unlocking the "Subject-Matter Link" (Article 90): The proposal resolves long-standing legal ambiguities around how closely an environmental criterion must relate to a purchase. It formally clarifies that indirect lifecycle impacts – such as fossil-free production processes, non-toxic manufacturing, and responsible raw material sourcing – are valid criteria, even if they do not alter the physical composition of the final product.

Food Procurement Gets Its Own Environmental and Social Lens

One of the more striking additions is a dedicated article on food. Recognising "the crucial role of resilient food systems in ensuring food security," the Regulation allows public buyers procuring food – for schools, hospitals, canteens – to weigh fair remuneration of farmers, the organisation of supply chains, organic production methods, quality schemes such as geographical indications, nutritional value, freshness, seasonality and animal welfare.

Because food-distribution services have limited cross-border relevance, they remain eligible for direct award procedures, giving public buyers considerable discretion to build these criteria into everyday purchasing decisions – from a school lunch to a hospital menu.

Ambition with Built-In Caveats

The environmental provisions are undeniably a step forward from a system long criticised for underusing procurement as a policy lever. Still, the framework leaves real questions open. "Quality" under BPQR is not tightly defined, and the Regulatory Scrutiny Board itself flagged the vagueness during the impact assessment process.

Buyers retain considerable discretion over which environmental criteria to apply and how heavily to weight them – meaning implementation could vary widely between Member States and even between individual contracting authorities.

The "comply or explain" derogation, while introducing accountability, also leaves the door open for buyers who prefer not to prioritise sustainability at all. None of these caveats undo the shift in direction, but they will shape how much environmental ambition survives the negotiations ahead.

What Comes Next

This is only a proposal. It now moves to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, where its environmental provisions – like every other part of the text – will be negotiated, potentially strengthened, potentially watered down.

The direction, however, is clear: after years of price-only logic dominating public tenders, environmental criteria are being written into the structural DNA of EU procurement law. Whether that ambition survives the legislative process intact is the question worth watching over the coming months.