CUSTOMER STORY
General Services Administration leverages VitalMetrics for comprehensive sustainable spend analysis
Background
The General Services Administration (GSA) is a United States federal government agency that supplies products and services for the U.S. government. With an annual expenditure of over $500 billion, the U.S. government is the single largest purchasing entity in the world. In 2013, the GSA awarded VitalMetrics a comprehensive sustainable spend analysis for the entire federal government spends. In 2015, GSA awarded VitalMetrics a follow-up study to update and refine the results. VitalMetrics analyzed over 3.3 million line items per year of federal spend data that contains over 800 million data fields. The analysis covered 12 environmental impact categories, ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to water consumption.
The thickness of the bars indicates the magnitude of weighted impacts. The right bar graph shows the contributions by GSA’s direct purchases; the left bar graph shows the contributions by the supply chain processes within GSA’s supply chain that directly generate environmental impacts.
Results
The results showed that ‘non-residential construction,’ such as roads, bridges and other infrastructure, constitutes the largest environmental impacts by direct U.S. federal government.
Among the supply chain processes that generate environmental impacts, the ‘electric utility’ sector is responsible for the most significant overall impact. Item-specific opportunities for reducing life-cycle impacts of procurement were analyzed in the context of available standards and eco-label programs that might further inform the GSA’s green purchasing policy.