Abstract
Thailand has developed the 20-year masterplan to be rooted in the sufficiency economy philosophy and adopting Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) as the pathway towards green growth. Following the masterplan, the 12th national economic and social development plan has been established to focus on sustainable development goals including SCP. To move towards SCP, the national roadmap on SCP was developed to provide the framework on SCP actions. Ecolabelling and sustainable procurement have been implemented to promote SCP. Thailand has developed various national ecolabelling schemes marketing tools to indicate the environmental information of products. At the beginning, manufacturers faced the issue of no market requirements while consumers did not particularly choose the eco-labelled products due to higher prices. The government then launched the national policy of sustainable procurement to increase the market demand for eco-labelled products. In the first phase, it was mainly applied by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment with 14 products and 3 services. In the second phase, it was expanded to the other governmental organisations as well as the private sector with 17 products and 5 services. Now, it is in the third phase extending to local administrative organisations including universities and more private enterprises with 19 products and 5 services. Particularly for the governmental organisations, the main barrier was linked to the financial rule to purchase the product with the cheapest price after comparing among at least 3 suppliers. Now this has been solved by the new financial rule based on the price performance (i.e. eco- labelled products with higher prices are acceptable). It is also very important to provide the list of approved suppliers to facilitate the organisations/companies applying sustainable procurement. Not only the governmental organisations and the private sector, it is also highly recommended that consumers should be informed and educated about different ecolabels with key messages to support their purchasing decisions and promote SCP.
