Valencia: sustainability and public procurement in the city

Valencia, located on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, with almost 800,000 inhabitants, is the third largest Spanish city. According to Cities in Motion Index, it has recently been described as one of the fifty best cities in the world. Sustainability and environmental criteria, as well as urban services place it near the top of the ranking of cities with the best quality of life.

This city is best known by its beaches, its food and its festivities–the famous Fallas–, which turned it into a tourist destination of excellence. Valencia is also an important enclave for knowledge, culture, research and technology. It has two public universities – University of Valencia and Polytechnic University of Valencia – and it has a firm and clear commitment to become a Smart City. In this regard it has developed a strategy that ties together the main actors of the local system of research and development (R&D).

It is the first Spanish 100% Smart City thanks to VLCi Platform, a tool that integrates indicators of more than 50 municipal services to improve the quality of life of citizens and efficiency as well as to reduce municipal spending. Valencia has also a commitment to reduce the levels of pollution, and the use of bicycles in the city has been strengthened.

In order to implement innovative policies that result in environmentally-friendly strategies, Valencia Town Hall opened a line of action: Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI). This led to projects such as CEPPI (Coordinated energy-related PPI actions for cities), co-financed by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, the aim of which is to promote energy efficiency through PPI, and training processes among civil servants who design these processes of public procurement.

In addition to CEPPI, Valencia is immersed in other groups that have action lines on PPI open, such as the case of the innovative Spanish cities network Innpulso or the project of the European network Climate KIC Public Procurement of Innovation in Action (PPIA).

The inclusion of Valencia in the Project Life Future, via its agency INNDEA, is in the same line of work. Life Future allows for the development of a tool to acquire sustainable urban furniture, guiding the process of tenders, from the generation of environmental requirements that contract specifications have to include, to the comparative environmental assessment among different products to obtain a green public procurement.

It has been estimated that the inclusion of these sustainable products could reduce 26.5% of its impact on global warming, 15.5% of energy consumption and 10.8% of the volume of waste generated. Furthermore, this project will lead to the expansion in the European market of these environmentally-friendly products and will boost their productivity through eco-innovation.

AIMPLAS Instituto Tecnológico del Plástico

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