Purchasing

Collectively, universities spend billions of dollars on goods and services annually. Each purchasing decision represents an opportunity for an institution to choose environmentally and socially preferable products and services and support companies with strong commitments to sustainability. Furman has developed sustainable purchasing guidelines to help promote sustainable procurement across the institution.

Did You Know?

The university has adopted a series of Green Purchasing Guidelines, intended to help minimize the environmental and social impacts of our purchasing decisions. 

Since 2017 Furman has offered a Green Office program designed to work closely with university departments to help them model and adopt sustainable behaviors, showcase their green practices, and garner recognition for their sustainability efforts. All 24 academic departments have participated in the program.

Furman aspires to be carbon neutral and has partnered with UCapture to help offset purchases. UCapture is a green-tech platform that partners with online merchants to fund projects like reforestation, methane capture, and renewable energy designed to help offset our carbon footprint, at no cost to the user.  You can help us reach our goal by creating a UCapture account here: www.ucapture.com/furman

Bon Appetit’s Farm to Fork program is a company-wide initiative to buy local food, with over 20% of foods served within the dining hall coming from within 150 miles of campus. Their goal is to purchase seasonal ingredients from small, owner-operated local farms and ranches when possible.

What’s Next?

Moving forward, we aspire to buy less, buy more responsibly, and improve our green purchasing efforts through:

• Adding levels and enhancing categories to include wellness and social sustainability to our Green Office program.
• Partnering with our office supply contractor (Staples) to encourage sustainable purchasing practices and products like tree-free copy paper.
• Promoting paperless classes and courses to our faculty and students.
• Increasing the sustainability of our cleaning supplies.
• Considering full cost analysis of our campus projects.
• Adding sustainability metrics to our RFPs as we renew our external vendor contracts.