Although the very notion of green procurement is a recent one, there are already precedents and success stories. In the 1980s buy recycled initiatives were launched both to support the movement for recycled-content products and take pressure off landfills. Many of these policies were quite effective in stabilizing markets for recycled goods, supporting curbside recycling programmes, extending landfill life, creating jobs and more (Mastny, 2004). In Europe, where green procurement is more widespread, many green products, like paper, have eliminated the price divide that always made them more expensive compared to mainstream products. And this is at least partly due to the greater economies-of-scale encouraged by government purchasing. By the early nineties, buy recycled had matured into a more generalized green procurement movement, as many countriesincluding Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and the United Statesimplemented a number of national laws or policies requiring government agencies to buy green. Institutional procurement, of course, involves much more than governments. The procurement decisions of a number of large corporations have had major impacts on green markets: including Bank of America (paper), Boeing (lighting), Nike (cotton), Federal Express (auto), McDonalds (packaging), and IKEA and Home Depot (wood). Some of these decisions were prompted by political pressures forcing the internalization of costs. But most were also driven by some kind of self-interest, and often helped achieve substantial efficiencies or pay-backs for the corporations in question. Universities are also major institutional purchasers, in the US constituting nearly 3 percent of the countrys GDP (Mastny, 2004).