• Identify availability and practicality of different options
• Calculate implementation costs and net financial gains
• Estimate environmental benefits
• Prioritize options
• Identify the budget

Now, you are ready to evaluate your list of options and decide which have potential to be goals for your organization. You want to be assess how practical your options are by looking at availability, financial costs, and financial and environmental benefits among other things. You should then prioritize your list so it will be easier to pick the ones you want to use as goals.

As with Step 4, this step may be simple and brief or more complicated depending on your organization and your list of options. If some of this is unnecessary or impractical, continue on with the next part of the process.

Identify availability and practicality of different options.  Obviously, if a certain technology is not available, you should not identify that as a top goal of your green fleet effort.  An example is the best way to demonstrate this point.  At this time purely electric vehicles are very limited in their availability and applicability.  There are very expensive electric cars beginning to be available and there are neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs).  If you can’t justify purchasing a $100,000 electric car or if you can’t use NEVs, you should be careful about setting a goal relating to electric vehicles.  That said, technology continues to advance and new companies keep entering the market so this situation may change in the future.  This example also demonstrates the importance of practicality.  NEVs are great additions to some fleets but may not be practical for others.  You do not want to set a goal for something that your fleet will not be able to use.

Calculate implementation costs and net financial gains.  Knowing the financial costs and benefits of your options will allow you to match your costs with your budget to determine what is financially practical. This process may also help you justify your goals to some and even help you make the case, if the opportunity arises, that you need additional resources to green your fleet.  Some options, such as reducing the size of your fleet, will save your organization money (by reducing operation and maintenance costs among other things for the previous example).  Some options will cost your organization money, such as retrofitting a gas fueling facility to dispense ethanol.  Document as much as you can of these costs and benefits to ensure you choose to work on things that are within your means.  See Section 10 and Appendix B for good information and useful sources on how to evaluate costs and benefits.  In addition, the Puget Sound Clean Cities Coalition can provide support with this information.

Estimate environmental benefits.  Not all benefits from projects are financial.  Some of your options will have environmental and other benefits that should be acknowledged in some way.  Again, see Section 10 and Appendix B for information on these benefits.  The Puget Sound Clean Cities Coalition can help with this as well.

Prioritize options.  Once you have completed the analysis on your options, you should prioritize them in some way.  This may be formal or informal depending on what makes sense in your situation.  If it is informal, collect some notes, assumptions and conclusions about the costs and benefits discussed above.  Combine this information and compare the various options to develop a prioritized list.

A more formal approach is shown in the next workbook section.  This involves using a rating scale for the factors discussed above.  Each factor is rated from one to five, and you select the rating that seems the best for each option.  The ratings will be subjective but that is OK; this is not supposed to be an exact science.  This method does, however, provide a good way of evaluating the relative costs and benefits of different options.  (You can see this in the two examples given on the workbook sheet.)  Because of this aspect, it may be easier to rate all your options for a particular factor then move on to another factor.  Use the factors and ratings on the workbook sheet as a guide there may be others that are more important or useful to your organization.

After you have selected a rating for each factor, combine the ratings to come up with a total score for each option.  In the example below, the lower the score, the better the option.  Again, feel free to create your own scoring system.  If there is a particular factor that is very important to you, you can use multiplication in your scoring formula to give that factor extra weight.  For example, if environmental benefits are very important to you, your scoring formula could be Total Score = Env’l Benefits * (Availability + Practicality + Net Cost).

Evaluating options is a part of the process where it may be very helpful to have a team doing the work.  Prioritizing your options in particular may be much easier if you have a group available to discuss the various factors and ratings and agree on a scoring formula.  It is also a way to divide up the work so that one person doesn’t have too much to do.

Whatever process you use, prioritizing options should ensure that you identify the low-hanging fruit and work on those things first.  Lastly, be sure you document and keep your prioritized list of options.  You will likely only use a few of the things on your list for goals.  The rest of your list will be useful in the future when you get around to updating your goals.  You will save yourself a lot of work at that point if you already have the analysis and prioritization done, especially with the more formal evaluation process.  You may need to update the analysis somewhat to account for technology changes, costs, etc. but starting with your previous list will save you a lot of time.

If you work in a larger organization where the green fleet policy affects many different sections or departments, we strongly recommend working with a committee of individuals from various sections or departments.  Key individuals may include

• Employees from fleet management/administration
• Policy or planning departments and
• Sections or departments that rely heavily on vehicles, such as public protection services, public works departments or parks departments.

Identify the budget.  Another obvious part of the process is knowing how large (or small) your budget is for greening your fleet.  You want to be sure that you have the funds available to act on the things you identified as priorities.  This is particularly an issue for things that require a large capital expenditure, such as a new fueling station.  You may also be able to use this process to push for additional resources to achieve more.