There’s yet more pressure on 600,000 businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: Future sales depend on it!

Any company supplying products and services to any federal agency will have to report its annual GHG releases or risk losing the ability to sell to the government.

That’s the point of new rules from the federal purchasing agency, the General Services Administration (GSA).  Government contractors will have to report GHG releases if they want to stay on the GSA list of preferred suppliers. Currently only 400 of the 600,000 companies supplying the government officially track and report their GHG emissions through The Climate Registry.

The GHG reporting requirement will begin in either 2011 or 2012, GSA says, once it reviews comments on its latest push to purchase only environmentally preferable products and services.

Plus, GSA is also offering extra green credits to suppliers that also track the GHG emissions of their own suppliers, so there will be huge trickle down effects as the GHG reporting demand ripples though the federal supply network.

Eventually, GSA wants government contractors to track GHGs per product, not just overall levels of climate-changing emissions like methane and carbon dioxide. GHG emission tracking would include the transportation costs of getting products from one supplier to the next and then to a federal agency.

Reason: GSA expects this and other environmental requirements will cut government operating expenses.

The GSA reporting requirement could reach far beyond a similar EPA reporting rule that only targets large companies. EPA’s rule targets more than 10,000 companies releasing more than 25,000 metric tons of GHGs per year.

There is no threshold in the GSA rule, which by the way, is seen as “voluntary” because it only affects companies that want to sell green products to the government.