Green Public Procurement (GPP) is an essential strategy for achieving goals related to public environmental policy, including sustainable production and consumption, streamlined use of resources and mitigation of climate change. The European Union has adopted policies towards “greening” public procurement for member states in order to promote environmental sustainability. Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is a method that measures the financial impact of an investment over the life cycle of a product. The current EU Procurement Directives (2014) are designed to position LCC centrally to sustainable sourcing. Although the literature identifies the links between the environmental dimension through GPP and the economic dimension through the use of LCC, the interaction between them in the context of public procurement has not been adequately captured. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the results of the LCC tools implementation in the context of GPP in Greece and study the economic impact of green procurement in public organizations. The urgent need of reducing energy consumption in the public sector due to the continuing energy crisis and climate change is an additional incentive to evaluate this impact. LCC tools developed by the EU were used, fed with data from public procurement contracts carried out in the Greek public sector. The results show that the adoption of environmental criteria requires market research, planning and coordination to make it cost-effective, especially under the legislative mandate of GPP in Greece by 2022.

Background: Green Public Procurement (GPP) is a sector that has been growing in recent years through policies encouraged by the European Union. In the Greek public sector, the respective National Action Plan (NAP), which sets specific targets for GPP, has very recently come into force. However, although the influencing factors that contribute to the success of the implementation of green procurement are a crucial element of this policy, they have not yet been explored for the Greek public sector. Methods: This study applied data collection and a combined qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The research was divided into two phases: (i) the identification of critical factors (CFs) based on the literature, and (ii) an analysis of fourteen experts’ insights into those factors employing the Grey DEMATEL approach. Results: Based on the surveyed literature, fourteen CFs that contribute to the successful implementation of GPP were identified. From the analysis of the experts’ views, the factors were classified into two groups. Each group contains seven CFs. The CFs in the first group (causes) affect the CFs in the second group (effects). Conclusions: This study of the success factors in implementing green procurement in Greek public organizations can be further improved by incorporating new factors, as well as by utilizing the presented results in the follow-up of the NAP.