The European Union (EU) could soon introduce legislation requiring public sector bodies across all member states to consider the environmental impact of any vehicles they plan to purchase.

The European Parliament's Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety voted in favour of the proposals last week and called on the Commission to shorten the timeline for introducing the new rules with a view to ensuring they are in place by 2010.

A spokeswoman for the committee said the new rules would effectively attach a monetary value to a vehicle's emissions, which public sector procurement professionals would be obliged to include in their running cost equations when making purchasing decisions.

Under the new rules, they would have to add three euro cents to calculated fuel efficiency costs for each kg of CO2 the vehicle emits and 0.44 euro cents for each gram of NOx emissions.

The committee stated that the new criteria should apply to the purchase of all public sector vehicles barring those "used to provide "operational support" or maintain infrastructure, as well as ambulances, fire and rescue vehicles and highly specialised vehicles".

It predicted that forcing governments to take account of vehicles' carbon emissions when making purchasing decisions would result in "substantial demand for clean and energy-efficient vehicles", noting that the total annual vehicle procurement by public authorities in the EU is currently estimated at 110,000 passenger cars, 110,000 light commercial vehicles, 35,000 lorries and 17,000 buses.

The committee also called on the Commission to establish a new scoreboard for benchmarking the environmental friendliness of procurement practices across relatively similar cities and regions.