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An environmental cost accounting system is a flow‐ and decision‐oriented extension of traditional cost accounting systems. It is based on cause‐and‐effect analysis which helps to assign the costs of environmental impacts correctly to their perpetrators. This article attempts to demonstrate how to use an environmental cost accounting system for internal and external audits and performance improvements. The generated information is appropriate to see if objectives and targets are achieved. High amounts of environmental impacts point to inefficiencies in the production area. Their elimination can help accomplish both ecological and business goals of a company.

Manufacturing and service companies are likely to make a variety of costs possible. Environmental costs are one of those costs. Environmental performance is one of the most important factors in assessing a company’s success. For environmental accounting, companies need to work together as teams of system designers, chemists, engineers, production managers, operators, employees, purchasing circle and accountants (those who may have never worked together before).

Nowadays, most of the companies are facing environmental issues and are seeking an appropriate way to report and disclose the information to the public. The environmental pollution issue is among the most important problems of today’s human society. Therefore, this is very important to use environmental accounting as an attempt towards protecting the environment.

Green accounting is a type of accounting that attempts to factor environmental costs into the financial results of operations. Apart from answering the question whether the economy has performed sustainably during one or more accounting periods, green accounting indicators [green gross domestic product (GDP)] can be used in policy formulation and evaluation. Green GDP calculations can contribute to raise awareness for sustainability concerns among national governments/policy-makers, who tend to concentrate on their countries’ fast economic development.

Environmental accounting can be applied to large and small companies in various industries, as well as in manufacturing or service sectors. Environmental accounting can be applied on a large or a smaller scale in a systematic manner for the required bases.

Environmental accounting requires the collection of information from all the groups. People of various groups need to talk to each other to achieve a common vision and understanding of environmental accounting and to realize this vision.

Undoubtedly, to establish an ideal system of environmental accounting in the country, accountants can become a powerful forearm of the government regarding economical and financial controls. To achieve this goal, environmental accounting objectives and tasks should be identified and defined in detail, and the standards, rules and criteria should be grounded and codified based on reasonable and practical principles.

Williamson's systematic treatment of transaction costs in explaining governance structures has rarely been applied to the field of environmental economics. The aim of this chapter is to address this oversight by analysing how transaction cost economics can help choose among environmental policy tools.

We apply the analytical framework of discrete structural alternatives – market, hybrid forms and hierarchy – to the choice of environmental policy instruments. Environmental-related transactions, which differ in their attributes, are aligned with categories of policy instruments, which differ in their cost and competence, so as to effect a discriminating – mainly transaction costs economizing – result.

First, we suggest defining the transaction as the trading of property rights to the use of natural resources. Second, the characteristics of the transaction are described as mainly measurement costs. Third, we determine the conditions under which a particular ‘governance structure’ that is a policy instrument is chosen.

A major contribution of our analysis is to question the relevance of many economists’ prescription in favour of incentive-based instruments. Indeed, in some plausible circumstances a command-and-control instrument may be more efficient by economizing on transaction costs.

Environmental economics has employed the seminal contribution of Ronald H. Coase (1960) intensively but has remained relatively unaffected by the contributions of perhaps his most influential follower, Oliver E. Williamson. Our chapter is a first step towards an operationalization à la Williamson of Coase's (1992, p. 778) ‘fundamental insights’ in the environmental realm.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

This study aims to investigate the association between corporate tax avoidance and environmental costs and disclosure in Indonesia and Australia for the research period 2015–2019. This study also analyzes corporate strategies for overcoming public concerns about tax avoidance activities, namely, the trade-off legitimacy and risk reduction strategies, through two mechanisms: the mediation and moderation roles of environmental disclosure on the relationship between environmental costs and tax avoidance activities.

The data consists of 675 and 235 observations for Australia and Indonesia, respectively, which were analyzed quantitatively using panel regression.

The results showed that the trade-off legitimacy or risk reduction strategies are not found to be implemented by companies in Indonesia, while in Australia, corporations use the trade-off legitimacy strategy to reduce risk and overcome the negative impact of tax avoidance activities. The results also provide empirical evidence on the impact of environmental costs on environmental disclosure in both countries.

This study contributes to the literature by providing the latest evidence on the role of environmental costs on environmental disclosure, which has rarely been investigated in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of managing the major environmental costs from an accounting perspective. The current state of practices for managing the costs associated with the consumption of electricity, water and paper, as well as the generation of wastes within three universities in Taiwan, was investigated. The costs mentioned above were termed “major” environmental costs for the purpose of this study.

Being an exploratory study, the paper followed a qualitative, case study methodology. A multiple‐case design was chosen and three Taiwanese universities were investigated. The major source of data collection was through face‐to‐face interviews. However, available resources were also examined, such as the charts of accounts, annual reports, strategic plans, sustainability reports and information disclosed on the web‐pages of the three universities.

The findings demonstrated that there appeared to be a general absence of environmental management accounting (EMA) utilisation to manage the major environmental costs by the three universities. Efforts to improve environmental performance, in particular from an accounting perspective, were still lacking.

The study contributes significantly to the following areas: providing specific information about how the major environmental costs are accounted for and managed; identifying limitations of current management accounting systems being used for the purpose of managing environmental costs; and extending the applicability of EMA to the higher education (HE) sector.

The study provides an insight into the application and usefulness of activity management (AM) principles in an environmental context. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of use of environmental activity management (EAM) utilising Gosselin’s (1997) three levels of AM (namely, environmental activity analysis (EAA), environmental activity cost analysis (EACA), and environmental activity-based costing (EABC)). The study also examines the association between EAM and environmental performance, and the role of decision quality as a mediator in this relationship.

Data were collected from 208 Australian organisations across different industries using a mail survey questionnaire.

The results indicate a relatively high extent of EAA use but a low extent of use of EACA and EABC. In addition, organisations using each level of EAM to a greater extent were found to experience higher levels of environmental performance. Furthermore, the relationship between EAA and EABC with environmental performance was found to be mediated by decision quality.

The findings suggest that organisations should endeavour to increase their use of EAM, and modify their existing costing systems to consider the drivers and costs of environmental activities.

This is the first study to empirically examine the extent of use of EAM and its association with environmental performance.

In recent years, cost‐effective protection of the environment has become a more important goal for many businesses. Companies have been striving to reduce the environmental impacts of their products and packaging, while not incurring costs that put them at a competitive disadvantage. A key to accomplishing this goal is by benchmarking their performance against other companies. Benchmarking can be expensive, time consuming, or problematic because detailed benchmarking requires detailed, specific data that are generally confidential. A screening level benchmark can accomplish much of the goal quickly and cheaply. Focuses on a tool to make quick, screening level benchmarks of US industrial environmental performance and discusses how it can be used to evaluate a plant's environmental performance. Mentions other tools, notes its relationship to them, and discusses how it can be more broadly used. Finally, suggests ways that this type of benchmarking information can be used broadly within a firm for accounting and decision‐making purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to simulate the environmental cost reports preparation used to measure environmental performance in realizing eco-efficiency.

This research uses a descriptive case study by using environmental cost detail data from 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. The research object is PT Industri Kereta Api (Persero) located in Madiun, East Java.

The result of the research shows that PT INKA (Persero) has not specifically made environmental cost report. It is found that the percentage of total environmental cost to operational cost tends to increase; the cost which gives the biggest distribution of total environmental cost is the prevention cost. By 2014, the effect of environmental costs on operating costs tended to decrease and during 2012–2014 PT INKA successfully maintained the blue star PROPER and the absence of environmental pollution reports.

PT INKA’s environmental performance is still well controlled and since its inception in 2014 PT INKA has succeeded in realizing the concept of eco-efficiency.