The Basque Government's Green Purchase Programme received a top award at the "2020 Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Awards" from the United States Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC) in the Public Administration category. As well as the Basque Government, organisations such as the Hilton hotel chain, the World Bank and Yale University were recognised.

Arantxa Tapia, Minister for Economic Development, Sustainability and the Environment, said how grateful she is for this recognition, since “this award recognises the work we have been doing for more than 15 years to enable the entire Basque government to use procurement procedures that include environmental criteria”.

The jury chose the Basque Government to receive this award in recognition of the approval and success of the Green Purchase and Recruitment Programme, whose member organisations succeeded in greening almost half of their purchases, 46%, in 2019.

The minister accepted the award during a virtual event during which she explained that “that the success of the programme you are recognising today is the result of a public-private collaboration to define environmental criteria required in public procurement in up to 28 categories of products and services. This has allowed our market to offer products and services with environmental advantages.”

The “Green Government Purchasing and Procurement Programme of the Basque Country 2020” was approved in 2016 to encourage the Basque Government to integrate environmental criteria into its purchasing and contract awarding processes, to raise the level of environmentalisation in public procurement to 50%.
At the current time, the Basque Government’s Green Purchase Programme, whose technical secretariat is operated by public company Ihobe, has 38 organisations that have succeeded in greening 46% of their purchases.

The Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC) is a US non-profit organisation whose mission is to support and recognise purchasing leadership that accelerates the transition to a sustainable future.
It has 180 members with over $300 billion in purchasing power. Its member organisations include entities from all public and private sectors such as: the Washington State Department of the Environment, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, WWF, Stanford University, California, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Alberta and Pittsburgh, telecommunications company T-Mobile, Sodexo, Accenture Consulting, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Nike, the Merck pharmaceutical company, LinkedIn in the digital field, as well as numerous city councils.