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 will in short time establish a quantitative target for reducing climate gas emissions related to the use of materials.

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 re-use 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, for instance schools and youth centres.

The City of Oslo is at the forefront of circular use of available resources, like using bio waste and city sewage for biogas production and using the resource to fuel city buses and waste trucks. Waste no longer reaches an endpoint, but is a resource to exploit. The core of the waste management system is an extensive system of source separation where the citizens work together with high-tech machinery to ensure high recycling rates. All waste becomes raw material either in the production of new products such as new plastic products, bio methane, and bio fertiliser or as heat and electrical power. Food waste, garden waste and sewage become biogas, soil-products and bio-fertilisers.

The City Council has a strong focus on sustainable food, i.e. by increasing the amount of organic food, setting requirements for good animal welfare, reducing food waste, reducing meat consumption and promoting plant-based diets. The city is continuously working on how to develop its portfolio of framework agreements, as well as assortment management, to make sustainable alternatives a simple and affordable choice. In addition, the city is focusing on training and other initiatives that leads to more sustainable food consumption.

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