The jury of the 2019 Procura+ Awards, which recognise excellence in sustainable public procurement, has revealed this year’s eight finalists.

In the category of ‘Sustainable Procurement of the Year’, the Government of Catalonia (Spain) – with its sustainable framework contract for cleaning services – will compete with ICLEI Member Ghent (Belgium) and its work partnering with suppliers on responsible workwear.

ICLEI Member Helsinki (Finland) is up against the Municipality of Frederiksberg (Denmark) for the ‘Innovation Procurement of the Year’ Award. The City of Helsinki used innovation procurement to ensure that a retro stadium upgrade was done in an environmental, low-maintenance and long-lasting manner. Frederiksberg needed to reduce the load on its existing drainage network, and used an innovation partnership to develop customised solutions to catch rainwater and manage its release.

The ‘Outstanding Innovation Procurement in ICT’ Award will go to either the City of Helsinki for robotisation and automation of library services, or to CERN (a research organisation based in Switzerland) for its use of innovation procurement to meet the big data storage and analysis demands of large scale scientific projects.

Finally, ICLEI Member Zurich (Switzerland) and IHOBE – a public company connected to the Department of Environment, Territorial Planning and Housing of the Basque Government – are competing for ‘Procurement Initiative of the Year’. The Swiss city applied with its initiative to use recycled concrete in buildings. IHOBE grabbed the interest of the jury with its deployment of a green purchasing programme in the Basque public sector.

The Procura+ Awards is an initiative of ICLEI Europe, with support from the EU-funded Procure2Innovate project.

The Procura+ Awards ceremony will take place on 24 September at the Nordic Edge Expo.

For more information on the 2019 awards, please visit the Procura+ website.