PAPIRUS: Public Administration Procurement Innovation to Reach Ultimate Sustainability

The overall objective of the international PAPIRUS project is to promote, implement and validate innovative solutions enabling the European community to achieve sustainable construction. The project implies an introduction of a new public procurement process focused on providing materials characterized by nearly zero energy consumption for the repair and construction of buildings in four European locations.
The project involves representatives of the public sector, which accounts for a significant proportion of the total number of existing buildings in Europe. The public sector has become an important factor in stimulating and serving as a model for the transformation of the market towards more efficient products, buildings and services.
Buildings consume approximately 40% of total final energy demand in Europe, which represents about one third of CO2 emissions on the continent. This is just one of the indicators that prove the construction sector and the existing properties greatly impact the environment. If we plan for the construction sector to have a significant contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (by 80-95% by the year 2050.), each building will have to demonstrate very low levels of carbon dioxide emissions and consume very little energy. This important in the context of reaching the goal of a non-carbon power industry.
In order to fulfil the main objective the following specific targets are set out in the project:
Promotion of the Strategic dual role of Public Procurers. On the one hand, the role of market maker, being the innovative technologies tractor. On the other hand, as early adopter, enabling the deployment of new directives of Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (Energy Performance of Buildings Directive5- recast (EPBD) is leading the transformation for new buildings.
Development of a new procurement strategy focusing on the identification and assessment of innovation. The process will focus on the identification and evaluation of innovation from the technological point of view (including risk assessment). In addition the new process will integrate a methodology for common evaluating of the tenders from different administrations and different countries.
Changing of the “purchase price only” mind-set. A key challenge identified by many public sector organisations is changing behaviour within purchasing departments – in particular using purchase price alone to decide between offers, rather than the full life-cycle cost of the product or service.
Transferring from a local market to European market. This proposal will develop economies of scale, making special emphasis in innovative SMEs.
Launching of a Coordinated public procurement in 4 pilot sites. All these objectives will be developed through the launch of a Public Procurement of Innovative solution in four European countries (Spain, Germany, Norway and Italy).
The PAPIRUS website contains several resources, including a guide on “How to Implement Public Procurement of Innovation.”