To achieve carbon neutrality, innovative approaches are needed in all sectors, including creative solutions for construction sites. A market dialogue in December brought public procurers from across Europe together in the context of the European Commission’s Big Buyers for Climate and Environment Initiative to explore these approaches.

Several clear takeaways came out of the event, which can guide and inspire public buyers across Europe:

• Market dialogue is fundamental to set procurement procedures, and to cultivate relationships of trust and collaboration between private and public sector actors.
• Suppliers want predictability from public buyers, want them to use strategic procurement to foster and reward innovation, and want clear timeline commitments that are communicated well in advance.
• By aggregating demand across buyers with substantial purchasing power, production of (and experience with) emission-free solutions can be accelerated, and prices will drop.
• Tackling emissions from construction works aligns well with multiple policy goals. Even beyond carbon emissions, the benefits include improved worker health, safer site conditions, better local air quality, and potential efficiency gains from less noise and restructured site logistics. Further, the business case for emission-free machinery is already better than equivalent diesel machines when using a lifecycle perspective.
• The technology for zero-emissions construction sites is already further developed than one may expect; in fact, several fully emission-free construction sites have already been carried out! What is needed now is the scale-up of this approach across Europe, which will require multi-actor dialogues, a collaborative spirit, and a commitment from both public and private actors to decarbonisation.

The December market dialogue convened public buyers and representatives from the machinery, contracting, and energy and technology field to explore innovative solutions to tackle emissions from construction works. Public procurers gathered valuable market intelligence on the state-of-the-art innovations, remaining barriers and suitable actions to accelerate the transition to emission-free construction works. The dialogue was also a chance to reiterate the ambitions and demands of the 17 public authorities that are engaging in this field via the Big Buyers working group.

Representatives from the ICLEI Members Oslo (Norway) and Copenhagen (Denmark) presented their approaches to zero-emission construction sites to suppliers, including the strategies used to pilot and scale-up the use of fossil-free and emission-free machinery on public construction sites. Representatives also presented the C40 Clean Construction Programme to demonstrate the global dimension of this trend towards emission-free construction works.

Suppliers pitched their innovative solutions directly to public buyers, and a panel discussion on opportunities and challenges facing zero-emission construction sites brought all participants together.

ICLEI convened this dialogue event, and will continue to work with the BigBuyers initiative throughout 2022, when the zero-emission construction sites working group will continue to jointly engage market stakeholders, work together to align their procurement procedures, and will collaborate to deliver outcomes that serve to share their learnings with other procurers.

For more information, visit: bigbuyers.eu.