f/EPA
United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
Office of
Prevention, Pesticides,
and Toxic Substances
_MC 7409
EPA742-F-96-001
September 1996
Environmental Accounting Project
Quick Reference Fact Sheet
Goal: To encourage and motivate businesses to
understand the full spectrum of their environmental
costs, and integrate these costs into strategic decision
making.
Background: Environmental and economic benefits
of practicing pollution prevention can be difficult to
measure using traditional methods of accounting. As
a consequence, industrial managers often may not
adopt pollution prevention even when it might be in
the best interest of a facility or company to do so.
Description: EPA initiated the Environmental
Accounting Project in 1992 to encourage businesses
to incorporate environmental costs into managerial
accounting and capital budgeting practices.
Implementing environmental accounting will make
environmental costs more visible to company
managers, thus making these costs more manageable
and easier to reduce. Environmental accounting
should help companies significantly reduce or
eliminate environmental costs, improve
environmental performance, and gain competitive
advantage.
The Project's Action Agenda incorporates
recommendations from the business community,
accounting and professional societies, the academic
and research community, small businesses, and
government on what needs to be done by various
stakeholder groups to increase the use of
environmental accounting. Major issues addressed
by the Action Agenda include:
• Terms, concepts, and roles,
• Management incentives,
• Education, guidance, and outreach, and
• Tools, methods, and systems.
The Environmental Accounting Project maintains a
Network Directory of some 680 members who are
actively participating or are interested in the issue.
Examples of Accomplishments to Date:
• Developed an environmental accounting primer
that covers the basic terms and concepts and
discusses application options
• Completed a status report the on the extent to
which the nation's manufacturing firms consider
environmental costs in investment decisions
• Published case studies on environmental
accounting initiatives at AT&T and at Ontario
Hydro (a Canadian utility)
• Trained state technical assistance providers and
permitters on the environmental accounting
concept in several regions
• Hosted workshops for industry and government
creating dialogue on environmental accounting
• Developed a software tool to help companies
incorporate environmental costs into their capital
budgeting decisions
• Published resource guide on tools and software
that account for environmental costs
Projects Underway Include:
• Best Practices report of chemical companies'
environmental accounting efforts
• Analysis of how environmental accounting
applies to the metal finishing industry
• Documentation of available techniques for
estimating potential environmental liabilities
• Continued outreach and exploration of ways to
simplify implementation of environmental
accounting
For further information: See the Project's Website
@ http://es.inel.gov/partners/acctg, or Contact
EPA's Pollution Prevention Information
Clearinghouse: 202/260-1023, fax 202/260-
0178,or Internet: ppic@epamail.epa.gov
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