Current Trends in Environmental Cost Accounting — and Its Interaction with Ecoefficiency Performance Measurement and Indicators

This paper provides an overview of current trends, state of the art and best-practice in environmental cost accounting as well as a discussion of how it complements environmental performance and eco-efficiency indicators. It addresses a number of current approaches to ECA. Amongst others, these will refer to the evolution of and experiences with ECA in companies, such as activity-based costing, process costing and target costing. The trend in cost accounting towards relating costs to material flows and related environmental impacts calls for indicators of integrated economic and environmental performance measurement, so-called eco-efficiency performance measurement.

The complementarity of ECA with environmental performance indicators (in particular eco-efficiency indicators) and environmental performance measurement also needs to take into account the integration of ECA and performance measurement into controlling and operations. Therefore, the paper will also discuss how ECA and environmental performance indicators can be integrated into decision-making. The paper and performance measurement approaches for decision-making under different firm-level operating conditions.