Environmental Cost Accounting

Environmental Cost Accounting Project cost estimating principles Return on investment calculations Project cost estimating principles... 

Epstein, M.J., 1996. Improving environmental management with full environmental cost accounting. Environmental quahty management 6 (1), 11—22. 

With respect to some hidden costs in environmental cost accounting that often are not considered, it seems that tracing flow of material could avail more information. Jasch (2003) evaluated environmental costs by using the concept of product life cycle and MFCA. 

Traditional co.sting procedure (TCP). This accounting procedure only takes into account capital and operating (including environmental) costs. 

In dealing with environmental questions, economists emphasize efficiency, social welfare, and the need for cost accountability. A basic principle for efficiency is that all costs be borne by the entity who generates them in production or consumption. For example, production and consumption of diesel fuel will be socially inefficient if significant resulting costs are shifted to others who happen to be downwind or downstream from the refinery that makes the fuel or the truck that burns it. The benefits of making and using the fuel should exceed the cost— society at large—or else the process reduces total social welfare. 

Including an ecovector to account for the exergoeconomic costs or environmental impact can extend the thermoeconomic approach. An ecovector is a set of environmental burdens of an operation, and can be associated with input flows it includes information about natural resources, the exergy of these resources, and monetary costs. The external environmental costs associated with the environmental burdens may also be added into the ecovector. Extended exergy accounting includes the exergetics flowcharts for nonenergetic costs of labor and environmental remediation expenditures. 

Companies are beginning to evaluate and account for nature and the true environmental costs and risks associated with chemical refining and manufacturing, the impact to natural capitalism. Natural capital refers to all of the resources used... 

Addition of environmental cost information into existing cost accounting procedures and/or recognizing embedded environmental costs and allocating them to appropriate products or processes... 

Integrating environmental costs into a capital budgeting analysis. Similar to total cost accounting (TCA). Synonymous with true cost accounting... 

Little, if any, political attention was paid, however, to the environmental costs associated with the long-term environmental and societal consequences of cotton production. Quotas set in Moscow drove regional political leaders and collective farm managers to push hard on the workers to meet the uruealistic quotas, quotas that were often met only on paper. There are many documented accounts about how the cotton production statistics were manipulated to please the Politburo thousands of kilometers away from Central Asia. 

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