Universities play an important role among public institutions because they initiate huge purchasing and contracting activities and contribute to sustainable development through education, research, and day-to-day operations. Existing studies on green public procurement (GPP) practices at Spanish universities focus on products and services. For this study, a total of 316 procedures were collected and analysed from the calls for tenders made by Spanish public universities between 2016 and 2017. The environmental criteria involved in the tenders and their weights were classified by subsector, geographical scope, and project budget. The results of this study show the use of environmental criteria in the works tendered by Spanish public universities is low (19.2%) in comparison with the results of other studies. It is therefore necessary to encourage GPP practices in the contracting process to comply with the environmental policies that universities have defined as part of their institutional policies.
Keywords: Spanish universities; environmental criteria; green public procurement; tendering; works.