The number of people travelling by public transport, bicycle and on foot in Oslo is rising – at the expense of car traffic. Oslo has the world's highest proportion of electric cars and is called the “EV Capital of the World”. Local and national authorities have made buying and owning electric vehicles very attractive and have thus boosted the private market for zero emission vehicles. Today, 60% of all new passenger cars sold in Oslo are electric.

The City of Oslo promotes suppliers that use zero emission vehicles. Environmental criteria are used in procurements that involve an element of transportation. The criteria apply to vehicles delivering goods, as well as those used by service providers in carrying out those services. From 2025, zero emission and biogas will be stipulated as a minimum requirement in all tenders where transport is needed.

From 2016 to 2019, Oslo participated in the BuyZET project together with Copenhagen and Rotterdam. Co-ordinated by ICLEI, the project aimed to understand and optimize the impact of public procurement activities on transport patterns in cities – and to find innovative and sustainable delivery solutions for goods and services. BuyZET was of great importance for the development of guidance, methods and environmental requirements that now apply.
Oslo has also come a long way with regard to sustainable public transportation, with an increasing share of zero emission buses. In addition to zero emission technologies, biogas is an important energy source for buses and other heavy-duty vehicles such as waste trucks in the city. Biogas used in Oslo is produced locally in the region from food waste and sewage.

 The City of Oslo has, through public procurement, established the first pilot of a construction site with only zero emission machinery. To initiate market development, there a broad dialogue has been organised with stakeholders aiming at developing a market for zero emission construction vehicles and machinery. The pilot has been a success, showing zero emission construction to be possible, with relatively low additional costs.

By 2025, all construction sites commissioned by the city of Oslo are to be zero emission. The city has gained experience form demanding fossil free construction over the past years, and has adopted fossil free as a minimum requirement in all construction procurements. In 2019, the city also adopted standardized award criteria to promote zero emission machinery.

Reducing indirect emissions related to building materials is also an important focus area for the City of Oslo. Several pilots are now testing requirements for recycled as well as low carbon materials. The City Council has established a quantitative target for reducing climate footprint related to the use of materials in buildings by 30%. 

Oslo is continuously improving its circular systems in order to make the most out of our resources. The City Council wishes to promote innovation and new jobs in the circular economy, and adopted «Strategy for a sustainable and circular consumption in Oslo (2019-2030)”. The strategy states that the municipality will facilitate a more sustainable consumption, where focus will shift from buying new to taking care of the things that are already in use; share, replace, upgrade, renew and repair. The strategy also emphasizes the importance of reducing material consumption through procurements, e.g. promote needs assessments, prioritize products that have components of recycled material, long lifetimes, warranty schemes, repair options, return schemes and recyclability.

The City of Oslo has good experience with the reuse of ICT equipment through a collaboration agreement with a work training company. Equipment is made available by the municipality free of charge, and enters a process where products suitable for reuse are upgraded if necessary, and spare parts can be selected before the remaining products is prepared for recycling. The collaboration agreement represents a triple bottom line. It contributes to the environment by keeping resources in the loop and reducing demand for new products, to the society by giving jobs to people falling outside of ordinary work life, and aims at providing functional and more affordable products to those who need them. The City has included a more repairable and environmentally friendly smartphone, which several of the City’s agencies has set as their standard model for work phones. The City has also increased its focus on supporting extended use time for phones and computers within the organization by working to make repairs and internal reuse easier. This is done through setting up internal reuse systems and services, and an increased focus on routines and circular practices.

In recent years, the City has increased its focus on facilitating more circular consumption patterns, in particular through its central framework agreements. For example, within furniture, where the City has  developed new contracts for redesign and repair of furniture. Soon, the City’s contract for the purchase of furniture will include the purchasing of used furniture. . To increase use-lifetime within important categories, the City has developed new contracts like repair of work shoes, repair of batteries in electric bicycles and a focus on repair of work wear. Through innovative procurement, the City is engaging start-ups to help support more circular thinking when different decision-makers, like users, procurers, and leaders, are making purchasing-related decisions on behalf of the city. That way we aim to connect the circular thinking in needs assessment with the development of circular options in central framework agreements.     

The City is focusing on reduced and smarter use of plastic. In the agreement for consumables, circular economy relevant award criteria were weighted by 70 %. The criteria concerned  ecolabels and the supplier’s ability to support reduced environmental impact of consumption. A different example is our agreement for medical consumables, in which the City has cooperated with the supplier to reduce the environmental impact of fossil plastic use. This has led to the testing of multi-use packaging with the potential to reduce tonnes of pallet plastic used in the deliveries to the City every year.

Throughout spring 2023 Oslo had a project with a StartOff-company to develop a prototype of a sharing platform for machines and equipment used in everyday maintenance of public schools. This include machines such as lawn mowers, grass trimmers and leaf blowers. Oslo has around 200 public schools and as of today, every school has their own machine fleet. However, limited budgets, storage capacity and challenges with charging infrastructure means that a number of schools are not able to have a complete electric machine fleet that meets the schools’ needs for operation and maintenance. Oslo now explores the possibilities for more sharing between the schools using a digital platform. The goal is to have fewer machines and better maintenance, and still obtain the equivalent operation level as before.

In recent years, Oslo has worked systematically to organize policies and work with sustainable and healthy food. In September 2023, an action plan was approved with the purpose of achieving the city council’s ambitions for sustainable and healthy food. The action plan presents strategic priorities in the municipality’s food policy with concrete measures to promote sustainable and healthy food in the City of Oslo.
The action plan has four targets:

1: halve meat consumption and increase the proportion of plant-based food
2: increase competence in sustainable, healthy and good plant-based food
3: halve food waste by 2030
4: contribute to developing the supplier market for sustainable food and emphasize
animal welfare and working conditions through procurement and consumption of food
and drink

The responsibility for implementing sustainable and healthy food in Oslo is placed with the Department of Finance. The executive body is the Agency for Improvement and Development.    

New city wide framework agreements on food
The city is continuously working on how to develop portfolio of framework agreements, as well as assortment management, to make sustainable alternatives a simple and affordable choice. The suppliers must deliver sustainable, plant-based and seasonal food. From December 2023, a new catering agreement for the administration and the politicians in the city of Oslo. The agreement adheres to the municipality's guidelines on vegetarian food, ecology and Fairtrade-certified products.

The City of Oslo continues to be at the forefront in fighting social dumping, work related crime, and ensuring decent labour conditions for workers in our domestic and global supply chains. More than 3 years has passed since the city adopted and introduced the first version of the “Oslo-model”. The model is a comprehensive framework of measures and requirements to help combat social dumping, and to promote decent working conditions, using public procurement as a strategic tool. It is a continuous work to further develop and implement the model.
Regarding domestic supply chains, the model compiles more than 20 requirements, and applies in particular to high risk industries such as construction and cleaning services.

Many of the City of Oslo’s contracts involves thousands of products manufactured all around the world. To promote human rights and ILO core conventions through Oslo’s procurements of goods, we set social selection criteria and standard contract clauses using Oslo's standard social criteria, adopted by the City Council in 2017. The selection criteria ensures that our suppliers have a management system for labour and human rights issues, and a system for traceability. The city uses social criteria in all contracts where production processes imply risks of adverse impacts on international human rights and labour rights.

At the contract management stage, we regularly follow up through reporting based on desktop research, follow-up meetings, documentation review and audits. We also regularly exchange with other public buyers and experts to address the systematic challenges in prioritized supply chains.

Based on risk, the prioritized categories on the City’s citywide framework agreements are ICT (mobiles, tablets and PC’s), food, medical equipment and textile. This means closer follow-up of contracts, collaboration with external experts and other public buyers to address systematic challenges and criteria development. The City has set additional criteria for suppliers to undertake social dialogue at the production site in textile production and requirements to reduce the risk of conflict minerals in agreements on PCs and tablets.

The city of Oslo is the “Fairtrade capital” of Norway and became the first public player in Norway to offer garments made from Fairtrade-certified cotton to the health sector through the joint venture agreement for washing and renting workwear and institutional clothing.

Through our membership at Ethical Trade Norway, the City of Oslo wishes to signal a strengthened commitment to work for ethical trade through procurement. Our annual member report to Ethical Trade Norway 2019 is available at the Report Database at www.etiskhandel.no