Advancing Public Procurement of Innovation: Highlights from the BRINC workshop in Brussels

Advancing Public Procurement of Innovation: Highlights from the BRINC workshop in Brussels

The BRINC project assists public buyers in capacity building, needs assessment, market engagement and procurement implementation. The project showcased its activities to facilitate the purchasing of innovative solutions to foster circular economy during a workshop held on 19 March 2024 in Brussels.

Two public buyers presented their procurement cases and gathered useful feedback and inputs from participants on how to move forward.

Institut Català de la Salut (ICS) aims to procure a solution to reuse or recycle single use sanitary materials. However, several factors hamper the search for a suitable technological solution (e.g. lack of capacity to handle the high volume of waste or the legal obligation of sterilization prior to recycling). One of the proposed solutions to overcome these hurdles that came from the BRINC workshop is to begin by a smaller procurement for the recycling of one single group of products.

The City of Copenhagen aims to procure a diaper recycling plant and has run a successful pilot of collecting diapers as a separate fraction. During the workshop, Copenhagen received valuable insights from a working plant in the Netherlands. Participants highlighted the need to futureproof a plant to be able to handle diapers of the future and discussed the possible recycling rates. The need and interest for cross-border collaboration to increase the volume of diapers was also reiterated.

The BRINC project has so far shown the importance of facilitating exchange between market innovators and public buyers, and of building capacity on the topic of procurement. The BRINC workshop featured other initiatives at European and regional level striving towards this same goal. One of them is the Public Buyers Community Platform, a forum aiming at connecting, informing, collaborating, and focusing efforts to promote digital, green, and social transition pathways. Participants also learned about the Flemish Region's Programme for Innovation Procurement and the Brussels Region's Sustainable public procurement strategy, which both aim at supporting local administrations in transitioning to circular and innovative purchasing practices through customised assistance. In addition, the Catalan Government presented the regional Public Procurement Action Plan (2022-2025), outlining the objectives to enhance environmental sustainability in procurement practices.

Lastly, the session closed with the presentation of the C-PRONE initiative, a newly created community on circular public procurement offering avenues for information exchange, a robust knowledge repository, and valuable policy insights to facilitate successful circular procurement endeavours.

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