The tool consists of six components designed to help your facility evaluate the environmental impacts of the products it purchase.

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To download these documents as Microsoft Word^© and Excel^© files, click here.

This diagram depicts the five basic steps involved in using the purchasing tool. These steps require action from both the health care facility and the suppliers.

This document describes why and how the purchasing tool is used. It explains the purpose of the Environmental Purchasing Questionaire and the Purchasing Decision Matrix.

This is the main component of the purchasing tool. It is used to quantify the environmental impacts of health care products. Thirty questions in six sections assess impacts across all product life-cycle stages, from manufacture to end-of-life.

This spreadsheet can be used to compare competing suppliers of a single health care product on attributes such as cost, delivery time, quality, and the Environmental Score provided by the Environmental Purchasing Questionaire.

This letter is a template for the cover letter that accompanies the Environmental Purchasing Questionaire that is sent to suppliers. It should be tailored to meet your facility's commitments to environmental protection.

This letter can be used to encourage the administrator of your facility to incorporate environmentally preferable purchasing strategies into daily operations. It is a template and should be tailored to your facility's requirements.

To make it easy for you to modify the basic components of the purchasing tool, they are provided below as downloadable MS Word^© and Excel^© documents. You may want to modify questions in the Environmental Purchasing Questionnaire to accommodate your facility's particular concerns. For example, questions 8 and 9 ask if the product is free of mercury and halogenated plastics like PVC. By changing these questions to focus on lead, silver, chromium, or another substance, you send a signal to your suppliers that these materials are undesirable.

To open these documents, you need version 95, or a more recent version of Word^© and Excel^©. The documents will be downloaded to the location specified in your browser's preferences.