A coalition representing more than 11,500 companies told the European Commission this week that voluntary environmental standards have failed, and asked it to make low-carbon criteria compulsory. Their target is the revision of the EU public procurement directives, due on 9 September, and their argument rests on a number that is hard to ignore. Green public procurement would apply to roughly 2.5 trillion euro of annual spending, about 16 percent of EU output.
Twenty-six businesses and civil society organisations signed the letter, sent on 18 August. They want the Commission to stop treating environmental criteria as an option that contracting authorities may adopt and start treating them as a floor that bidders must clear. The current framework, built partly on the Net Zero Industry Act agreed in 2024, leaves most of that choice to national and municipal buyers.
Those buyers overwhelmingly choose price. Procurement officials face audit rules, budget scrutiny and legal challenge from losing bidders, and the lowest compliant tender is the easiest decision to defend. A green criterion adds a judgement call, and judgement calls invite litigation. That incentive structure explains the uneven uptake far better than any lack of political will in Brussels.
The Commission already has a working template for something narrower. Regulation (EU) 2026/718, adopted at the end of March and binding on member states since the end of June, sets the first mandatory minimum sustainability requirements in renewable energy procurement. It obliges wind turbine blades bought with public money to meet a recycling rate of at least 70 percent.
That rule works because it is measurable. A recycling rate is a number a supplier can certify and a procurement officer can verify. Extending the same logic to concrete, steel, vehicles or IT hardware requires equivalent standards, and for several of those product groups the measurement methodology is still contested.
This is where the coalition’s request meets its practical limit. Mandatory criteria without agreed metrics shift risk onto exactly the buyers least able to carry it. Large national agencies employ technical staff who can assess embodied carbon claims. A municipality of 20,000 people does not, and it will either default to whatever certification a supplier presents or avoid the category altogether.
Industry support for compulsory rules is also more self-interested than the letter suggests, and reasonably so. European producers who have already invested in lower-carbon processes compete against imports made under weaker constraints. Mandatory procurement criteria would convert that investment into a market advantage. The carbon border adjustment mechanism does similar work at the frontier, and public purchasing would extend it to the demand side.
The counterargument deserves a hearing. Mandatory criteria raise the price of public works at a moment when member states are also being asked to spend more on defence, housing and grid infrastructure. Ministries facing fixed budgets would buy less, and the coalition’s letter does not address that trade-off directly.
Legal design will decide which version survives. If the September proposal writes criteria into the directives themselves, member states will spend two years transposing them and another two arguing about scope. If it delegates the detail to implementing acts, as the wind blade rule did, the Commission gains speed and loses the political cover that comes from parliamentary agreement.
Nothing in the letter binds anyone. Its value lies in signalling that a significant part of European industry now prefers a mandatory rule to a voluntary one, which reverses the usual alignment on regulatory burden. The Commission publishes its draft on 9 September, and that document will show whether the reversal registered.
