Advancing green public procurement in the furniture sector: A proposal of environmental indicators based on type I eco-labels

Public procurement plays a fundamental role in promoting sustainable and responsible markets, as it represents the largest public buyer in the European Union (EU). However, the environmental criteria for the furniture category within the Green Public Procurement (GPP) framework have remained unchanged since 2017. This paper examines the existing EU GPP criteria and integrates the environmental requirements of five Type I eco-labels programmes (EU Ecolabel, Blue Angel, Nordic Swan, Good Environmental Choice Australia and the Environmental Quality Assurance Label) in order to develop a more ambitious and operational proposal. The resulting framework consists of 34 environmental indicators and a total of 162 detailed criteria, with measurable threshold values aligned with current regulations and high environmental standards. It provides contracting authorities with a structured scoring system that enables transparent and objective verification of whether companies’ offers comply with tender requirements and how far they go beyond minimum thresholds. A sensitivity analysis of alternative scoring distributions (linear, concave and convex) was carried out to examine how different shapes of the scoring curve influence the differentiation among environmental effort levels. Its level of ambition was illustrated through a case study in which the evaluation of a furniture company under both a real tender and the proposed framework demonstrated higher environmental stringency and greater discriminative capacity among bidders. By placing environmental criteria at the core of award decisions and contract conditions, the framework strengthens the role of GPP as a driver of cleaner production in the furniture sector and better aligns public market incentives with EU sustainability objectives and contributes to the broader cleaner production agenda.