This paper analyzes the effects and limitations of green purchasing policy (GPP) developed by municipalities, using data from a survey conducted by the Ministry of the Environment. A cross tabulation of GPP and barriers to green purchasing suggests that the GPP mitigates problems caused by lack of staffing and manuals. In addition, the regression analysis reveals that not only declaring the promotion of green purchasing in the environmental policies of a municipality but also formulating its GPP increases the probability that employees will realize the direct effects of green purchasing. However, the estimation results do not suggest that the GPP increases the probability of measuring those effects. From this, we infer that the GPP is not effective in addressing one of the major barriers to promoting green procurement, the difficulty in understanding the effectiveness of green procurement.

Due to the spread of COVID-19, telework has diffused rapidly. In this study, we conducted an online survey on the current condition of telework, especially in urban areas where there are many teleworkers. Based on the results, we quantitatively evaluated the impact of the current telework style on energy consumption and CO₂ emissions. As a result, it was found that (a) since many people use public transportation to commute to work, telework has little effect on reducing energy consumption associated with commuting; (b) even though the number of people commuting to work has decreased, there are many cases where measures such as reducing office space have not been implemented; and there is not much room to reduce energy consumption in offices, as the overall energy consumption may actually be increasing. In order to reduce energy consumption by telework in urban areas, it is necessary to appropriately reduce the space used in offices according to the level of telework and to devise ways to reduce energy consumption during telework. In addition, it was found that attention should be paid to the types of leisure time activities that lead to an increase in energy consumption.