Imagine that you run a small business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and you’re looking to reduce your environmental impact. You want to buy more environmentally friendly alternatives to your current cleaning and office supplies, but the price differential is beyond the means of your budget. Now imagine you could leverage the buying power of a consortium of other businesses, colleges, churches and non-profit organizations in your region, giving you a better deal by joining a much larger purchase order to a local green supplier. This is what happens when green purchasing meets local purchasing.

Purchasing green products that contain no toxic materials has been proven to reduce environmental burden. Green purchasing also favors buying locally, which promotes the local economy and greatly reduces transport-related emissions. At the Delta Institute, we view green purchasing not only as an environmental improvement strategy, but also as an economic development tool to retain local businesses and, eventually, to attract sustainable businesses to the region.

Our goal is to transform the Great Lakes region into a demand center for green products and make green purchasing mainstream. Ultimately, through the demand for green products we hope to bring companies that manufacture and distribute those products to the Great Lakes region.

The Delta Institute has established the Great Lakes Green Purchasing Consortium to harness the large-scale purchasing power of public and private organizations throughout the Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes Green Purchasing Consortium will ultimately be comprised of local buying cooperatives focused on purchasing green and local products.

Our initial efforts are focused in Chicago, Illinois; West Michigan; and the Milwaukee/Racine area of Wisconsin. In 2009, we intend to develop an open access website that will provide local consortium members with technical information and a venue for peer-to-peer networking about green products. Grant funding from the Grand Victoria Foundation and the Great Lakes Protection Fund is supporting the creation of an infrastructure to make the Great Lakes Green Purchasing Consortium self-sustaining.

In West Michigan, we have worked with local stakeholders to form the first public-private green purchasing cooperative. Our efforts have resulted in one of the first public-private purchases of a commodity product- recycled content paper.

We are currently identifying additional products for group purchase. For example, replacing certain janitorial products with green alternatives will improve water quality by removing hazardous pollutants such as alkyl phenols. Additional information about the West Michigan cooperative can be found at www.wmspc.org.

Our efforts in Chicago and Milwaukee have already begun. In each area, we are forming green purchasing consortiums focused on high volume purchases of green products and services as well as assisting local members to develop green purchasing policies for their respective organizations. We are also working with large volume purchasers in the Chicago area to identify products and develop our first bid as a consortium.

For more information about the Great Lakes Green Purchasing Consortium, please contact Abby Corso at the Delta Institute at 312.554.0900 extension 25 or via email at acorso@delta-institute.org.