The Office of Sustainability leads efforts by the City and County of Denver to secure the economy and enhance the quality of life by ensuring that basic resources are available and affordable for all Denver residents, now and in the future.

The City has been busy working on sustainability issues, and its Purchasing Office is strongly committed to reduce its environmental impact, as well as to achieve other societal and economic benefit. For that purpose, the Purchasing Department established an Environmentally Preferred Procurement (EPP) program to focus on sustainable solutions in its solicitations. With the EPP program, purchasing focuses on identifying environmentally friendly products and services and strategically implementing sustainable procurement practices throughout the City.

Some achievements have already been made thanks to the EPP program, for instance, the recent bid to purchase the City’s Car Wash Soap.

The Purchasing Staff coordinated with the Department of Environmental Health to evaluate the annual bid submittal from Waxie Sanitary Supply. The bid was for car wash soaps and cleaners, floor cleaner, petroleum cleaner, and dumpster and compactor cleaners. These products use microorganisms to “liquefy and digest organic and petroleum hydrocarbon waste.” These bioactive products are now used in the truck washes and to clean the floors and drains at the Roslyn and Central Platte fleet facilities, Cherry Creek Transfer Station, and Denver International Airport. All these products are certified compliant with an Eco-Logo for reduced environmental impact.

These eco-friendly products helped to reduce costs by 38% and to reduce and eliminate unwanted organic materials in water drainage systems. By reducing maintenance costs of the car wash bays, the system performance also improved.

Denver is also focusing on its 2020 Sustainability Goals, concerning 12 resource areas: air quality, climate, energy, food, health, housing, land use, materials, mobility, water quantity, water quality and workforce. Within this program, in 2013, Denver partnered with the Colorado Energy Office and several large for-profit companies to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding that will accelerate conversion of gasoline-powered fleet vehicles to cleaner-burning domestic natural gas. Denver International Airport has emerged as one of the greenest airports in the world and in 2013, the first all-electric shuttle bus was put into service between the airport and nearby hotels. City government has walked the walk on energy efficiency by reducing the energy intensity of city facilities to 5.6% below the 2011 baseline.