What are Italy's CAM ICT and what do they change for procurement?

CAM ICT is Italy's set of Minimum Environmental Criteria (Criteri Ambientali Minimi), mandated by the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security (MASE) for the operating lease and supply of computers, monitors, tablets and smartphones, new or refurbished, in public tenders. The implementing decree, dated 11 March 2026 and published in Official Gazette no. 70 of 25 March 2026, took effect on 24 May 2026 and stems from article 57 of the Public Contracts Code (Legislative Decree 36/2023), which makes including CAM mandatory in every public tender for that product category. The change with the most operational impact is a binding threshold: supply tenders must acquire a minimum share of refurbished products. This is no longer an optional best practice to mention in a sustainability report; it is a technical requirement inside the tender specification, checked like any other spec, with the same consequences for non-compliance as a failure on price or delivery time.

See also: Green IT and Digital Sustainability · The practices for reducing the energy footprint of IT infrastructure and AI workloads, now also a CSRD reporting obligation.

What it requires

The technical specifications sit in Annex 1 to the decree, but for anyone buying technology the substance comes down to four points. First, durability and repairability: equipment must guarantee spare-parts availability and repair options for a minimum period, not just performance at the point of purchase. Second, refurbished hardware stops being a budget fallback and becomes an option to plan for by contract, with a minimum quota that can be met across multiple procedures or through the purchase tools of central purchasing bodies and, where one product type falls short of it, offset with refurbished products of other types. Third, operating lease is recognized as a legitimate supply method for CAM purposes, useful for anyone who wants to meet the threshold without managing a refurbished fleet internally. Fourth, the energy efficiency of devices and, where relevant, of the cloud services and data centers involved in the supply becomes part of the evaluation criteria, a theme connected to what is covered under Green IT and digital sustainability. Anyone drafting a tender today has to translate these four points into verifiable technical clauses, not statements of intent: refurbishment certificates, repairability guarantees, energy consumption data requested in the bid.

A concrete example

A public administration renewing its fleet of laptops and monitors will now structure the tender with a share of lots reserved for certified refurbished units, minimum repairability clauses on new purchases, and a technical score that rewards the energy efficiency declared by the supplier. A private company applying the same criteria to its own IT renewal, without being obligated to, gets the same benefit: suppliers selected on objective durability and impact parameters, not on purchase price alone, with a direct effect on controlling IT costs over time thanks to longer-lived hardware.

Why it matters for decision makers

For an ICT supplier bidding on public tenders, non-compliance with CAM ICT is grounds for exclusion: it is not a detail to defer to the compliance office at the end of the process, but a constraint to build into the technical proposal from the start. For anyone selling refurbished hardware or operating leases, the decree is instead a concrete differentiation opportunity: the mandatory minimum quota turns an offering that previously had to justify itself into a requirement the tender specification demands outright. For buyers, public or private, the practical point is that environmental criteria stop being a separate chapter of the tender and become part of the technical evaluation, on par with performance and price.

This entry is informational and does not constitute legal advice: for drafting tender specifications compliant with CAM ICT, involve the responsible procurement officer (RUP) or legal counsel.