Green Public Procurement in 2026: The Shift to Mandatory Criteria

The EU has published ready-made green procurement criteria for around 20 product and service groups for years, but applying them has been voluntary — and uptake has been patchy. That is the problem the 2024–2026 wave of legislation targets.

The shift now under way is that environmental requirements are moving from optional guidance to legal obligation — but only in specific areas. It is accurate to say green procurement is becoming mandatory; it is not accurate to say every tender now carries mandatory eco-criteria. The mandatory core in 2026 is narrow but expanding fast, and the table above is the honest map of where the line currently sits.

Four EU instruments create binding obligations today:

• The Net-Zero Industry Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1735) — when buying net-zero technologies such as solar, wind, batteries, heat pumps or hydrogen electrolysers, authorities must apply minimum sustainability requirements and a resilience contribution. These procurement duties apply from 30 December 2025.
• Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/718 — the first binding *minimum* under that Act. Applied carefully: as of 30 June 2026 it currently requires only that the rotor blades of onshore and offshore wind turbines achieve at least a 70% recycling rate. Other net-zero technologies are deliberately deferred because EU-wide measurement methods are not yet ready — so this is not, despite some reports, a four-criteria rule across all clean tech.
• The Clean Vehicles Directive (2019/1161) — binding national targets for procuring clean and zero-emission road vehicles.
• The Energy Efficiency Directive (2023/1791) — public bodies must purchase energy-efficient products, services and buildings.

Looking ahead, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (2024/1781) is the engine that will make green criteria mandatory product-by-product — for steel, aluminium, textiles, furniture, tyres and electronics — as its implementing acts land from 2026 onward.

Green requirements enter a tender through three standard levers, and it is worth knowing which is which:

• Technical specifications set the minimum a product or works must meet — a recyclability rate or energy class — on a pass/fail basis; a non-compliant bid is rejected.
• Award criteria score competing bids, so environmental quality becomes a weighted share of the decision.
• Contract-performance clauses bind the winner during delivery — carbon reporting, waste management, take-back.

Underpinning all of this is a move away from lowest-price awards. EU law already lets buyers award on the best price-quality ratio with life-cycle costing, and the 2026 rules — and national laws — push firmly in that direction. A cheaper, higher-emission bid can now lose on points.

France has the most far-reaching national mandate. Under Article 35 of its 2021 Climate and Resilience law, fixed in force by decree, every public contract for which a procedure is launched from 21 August 2026 must include at least one environmental award criterion and at least one environmental contract-performance clause — and awarding on price alone becomes illegal. It applies to all public buyers and all contract values, with only a narrow, expressly justified exception.

This is the single clearest 'mandatory green procurement' rule in Europe, and it is why French tenders are the place suppliers will feel the change first. (Some sources cite 22 August, the law's five-year anniversary; the decree-fixed date is 21 August 2026.) Our guide to finding tenders in France covers the portals where these contracts appear.

Not every country mirrors France. Germany has no blanket 'environmental criterion in every contract' rule; its law permits and encourages green criteria and lets buyers weight them. What it does have is a binding CO₂ shadow price for the federal administration (the AVV Klima), which prices carbon — around €55–65 per tonne in 2026 — into the life-cycle cost calculation, in service of a climate-neutral federal administration by 2030. A wider procurement-reform bill has not yet passed, though the EU-level rules above apply directly in Germany regardless.

Spain's public-sector contracts law (Ley 9/2017) already favours best price-quality over price alone and, under Article 145, requires measurable environmental criteria to be valued in contracts with significant environmental impact. Its national green-procurement plan remains, for now, a voluntary framework. In short, both countries mandate that environmental criteria be *considered*, but neither yet matches France's universal per-contract requirement.

Whether you sell wind turbines, IT or cleaning services, the competitive documents are converging. Keep these tender-ready:

• Environmental Product Declarations (EN 15804 / ISO 14025), increasingly requested as proof in specifications and award criteria;
• Product and organisational carbon footprints (ISO 14067, ISO 14064, and the EU's Product Environmental Footprint method) — essential to score on carbon criteria and to compete under Germany's CO₂ shadow price;
• Environmental management certification — ISO 14001 or EMAS, a common capacity check;
• Circularity evidence — recycled content, recyclability and recycling rates, durability and take-back schemes, ahead of the Ecodesign Digital Product Passport;
• Recognised eco-labels — the EU Ecolabel, Blue Angel, Nordic Swan, EU energy labels.

Being able to compute a life-cycle cost and a lifecycle carbon figure is quickly becoming decisive rather than optional.

Two larger shifts sit behind all this. The Ecodesign Regulation will keep attaching mandatory criteria to specific products through the late 2020s. And the EU's broader procurement reform — the proposed Public Procurement Regulation expected in September 2026 — aims to mainstream non-price and 'Made in Europe' criteria across the board. That reform is a proposal, not yet law, so treat it as direction of travel.

For a supplier, the practical challenge is spotting the tenders where these criteria now decide the award — scattered across TED and dozens of national portals, in several languages. Jorpex monitors them together with keyword, CPV and value filters, so green and clean-tech opportunities reach you the day they publish, alongside adjacent themes like social value in the UK.