Implementing Environmental Cost Accounting in Small and Medium-Sized Companies

Abstract

As a result of increased corporate environmental costs since the 1970s and steadily rising costs and innovation pressure in globalised competition, corporate environ-mental cost accounting (ECA) is continuously under attention. Cost management decisions - and ensuing entrepreneurial decisions - will increasingly depend on successful acquisition and transfer of information and data that consider ecological as well as economic effects. Sustainable future-oriented corporate governance will not function without an ECA to support the planning, management and control of the company. Within the framework of the project Integration of ECA into environmental management systems in SME's sponsored by the German Federal Foundation for the Environment (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt-DBU), Osnabruck, ECA was successfully implemented in more than ten companies. The project was carried out in co-operation between the Institut fur Okologische Betriebwirtschaft (IoB), Siegen, and the Internationales Hochschulinstitut (IHI), Zittau, both Germany. The objective of this project was to show economic and ecological advantages of, but also barriers to, ECA implementation by examples of German companies on the one hand and Czech and Polish ones on the other. The selection criteria as regards the companies were on one hand the size of the enterprise and on the other the willingness of management to implement an ECA. The project was especially focused on the operational use in SMEs and represents a further development of existing flow cost accounting systems (see e.g. Burritt and Schaltegger, 2000). The following describes the implementation methodology developed in the project and illustrates how this method was applied in one of the companies which participated in the study.