Life Cycle Costing Implementation in Green Public Procurement: A Case Study from the Greek Public Sector

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

Thank you for your efforts. This article seems to be worth publishing but needs to be significantly revised.

Introduction. The problem is not clear, although you state that there is a problem in line 71 you provide no details on what it is or why. Moreover, the objective of the research is vary vaguely described in lines 71-73. Please clarify. The section “GPP in Greece” might help since the contribution and the challenge becomes more specific.

Another comment is that GPP doesn’t necessarily mean “cutting public expenditures on products and businesses” which is written in line 43 and also written in abstract. A solution with less environmental or social impact might also be more expensive. Please rewrite to make it clear that you understand this. Finally in line 62, it is not clear why you suddenly talk about data, the logical flow is lost in the text.

The section of text between heading 2 and section 2.1 is not easy to follow. Revise.

Explain the term externality the first time you introduce and relationship to environmental impacts, LCA etc.

 

Lines 190-194. The way this is written it seems as though these sentences come from the EU directive, which they do not. Also, this is not the only way to make these calculations.

It is very hard to understand your methodology especially section 3.1. The text is not well-written and there are crucial bits of information missing. For example, after reading carefully it is unclear whether you used cases where green criteria had been used by the public authorities and then you came “ex-post” and did LCC. How many cases of GPP did you look into? How did you identify the cases, was it through projects? How did you collect data? What are the data sources? Did you calculate externalities or not? How did you deal with uncertainties Why did you do the LCC? What did you want to learn? A methodology should be described in sufficient detail to be reproducible. Please revise the whole section.

The results are interesting but you can do more to highlight them. Also consider calling this section results and analysis as you do some further analysis of the results.

Lines 354-356, the argument is weak. The problem with indirect costs is that it is not clear who is burdened by them. Have you only included externalities that burden the government? What are your boundaries? Indirect costs might not financially burden the government hence they are only taken them into consideration for "the greater good of humanity" and not because they actually profit from them.

Moreover, I am confused about the what is stated in lines 356-361. Don’t you compare equal alternatives?

Lines 362-369 I think what you are trying to say that an item with only slightly higher total lifecycle costs and investment costs may be good to purchase from an environmental perspective because you get lower indirect costs as is the case in pr 5. Is that what you are trying to say? Using percentages like 131% does not help you to make that argument. I would suggest using absolute numbers to argue. Or maybe you are trying to say something completely different?

How about making a summary of your findings? Also maybe a closer inspection of your data will reveal more findings. For example is there a difference between lighting and office equipment?why do you only show the lighting results.

Discussion section has some good parts but you need to use literature by other authors to discuss your results. What do you find that is new, especially compared to the authors mentioned in Section 2. What is the problem of using LCC and not LCA see for example Gluch, P., & Baumann, H. (2004). The life cycle costing (LCC) approach: a conceptual discussion of its usefulness for environmental decision-making. Building and environment, 39(5), 571-580.  and  hoogmartens et al 2014 in your literature list. This also means that indirect costs might be much larger than what is included in the LCC because only externalities that can easily be monetized are included. Also discuss other aspects of using LCC in public procurement such as the difficulties of individuals who are not trained to use LCC and therefore might not know what to include, or been able to actually calculate indirect costs see for example Gluch, P., Gustafsson, M., Baumann, H., & Lindahl, G. (2018). From tool-making to tool-using–and back: Rationales for adoption and use of LCC. International journal of strategic property management, 22(3), 179-190.Kambanou, Marianna Lena. "Life cycle costing: understanding how it is practised and its relationship to life cycle management—a case study." Sustainability 12.8 (2020): 3252.

 

I think that the conclusion section is quite well written but are not strongly anchored in the results which leads me to think that the biggest challenge with the article is with how it is written rather than the analytical process it builds upon. Good luck!

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript is a comparative study of the economic aspect of public procurement when environmental considerations are introduced in. It is an interesting and important topic as Life Cycle Analysis is an essential concept in GPP. In general, the manuscript is well-structured and easy to read. However, there are several minor points I would like to point out:

 

1. The introduction can be improved. I suggest the author state the research objectives and research question more clearly.

2. The part “Insights of GPP” is a little bit vague to me. It needs to be enriched by including more works of literature. I would suggest the authors intensively revise part “2.1 Life cycle costing in public procurement“. It reads like a report or a book chapter rather than a research paper.

3. In table 2, the price of the green products is lower than the non-green products for some projects I am wondering if there is any specific reason for this. Usually, green products are more expensive.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

I think you have missed an opportunity to clarify and strengthen both you results and discussion sections. My intention with comments 1.8 -1.10 was to show you that someone who has read in detail can't follow your argumentation and with comments 1.11-1.12 was not to request that you cite specific articles but to point you in a direction towards a stronger discussion section that builds on previous literature. This work fulfills the the basic requirements for publication.
Best Regards,
Reviewer 1

Reviewer 2 Report

All of my questions have been adequately answered.