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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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the externalities in social environmental accounting.

The paper is based on the fundamental research that is related to inductive accounting theory and uses scientific methods for identification of theoretical and practical difficulties of recognizing the externalities in social environmental accounting.

The main finding of the paper is that the information portfolio for the assessment of the externalities will contribute to the accurate estimation of the accounting offer and to the objective judgment of the requested information of this kind within the global performance management. This feat will allow construction of a pertinent informational base concerning the externalities, for integration of the external social costs into the conventional accounting model with a view to smoothly substantiating the socioeconomic and environmental policies.

This paper focuses on designing a social arrangement that, in the presence of externalities, can offer an optimal allocation of resources and thus a maximization of welfare for Romanian companies.

The paper helps put the organization in a stronger competitive position in relation to firms that apply only conventional accounting and is not extensively and creatively in using the outcomes of expanding social environmental accounting in its decision making.

The requirement of full cost recovery for water services including environmental and resource costs in accordance with the polluter pays principle in Art. 9 EU-Water Framework Directive is a unique provision in the history of the European environmental law. The wording of the provision is a compromise between the Council's and the Parliament's versions that mirrors different conceptual ideas on how to internalize environmental and resource costs. Art. 9 now contains a two-step concept for the achievement of the aim. The uniform implementation of the full cost-recovery calls for common accounting standards for the calculation of financial cost and a common methodology for the estimation of environmental and resource costs on the European level. In Germany, the requirements of the first step are partly fulfilled, but necessities of the second step are not being met at the moment.

This paper seeks to introduce a conceptual methodology to support decisions about environmental systems.

The methodology incorporates activity‐based costing and management, the analytic hierarchy process, and business process modeling using the IDEF0 method.

An illustrative example that applies the methodology to a semiconductor manufacturing facility is presented in the paper. The company used the results to analyze a process improvement.

The complexities and nuances of the approach will require facilitation and support. Making the technique more transparent and available to management is a barrier to its diffusion and application.

Potential managerial application and implications include areas such as product cost management, business process design and technology selection.

Application of the methodology encourages management to more fully assess the environmental implications of their decision in evaluating alternative technological processes while also allowing for the inclusion of other organizational decision dimensions.

Any measure of eco‐efficiency requires financial information, for calculating the numerator, and physical information about the environment, for calculating the denominator. Accounting and finance staff provide key financial information about the numerator in eco‐efficiency calculations. Hence, for eco‐efficiency measures to be calculated and for the measures to add value it is essential for them to be integrated with accounting and financial management processes such as budgetary control. Calculating measures of eco‐efficiency is not enough on its own to ensure corporate value is added. Accounting and finance staff have to be involved in the planning of future long‐term eco‐efficiency improvement. If value added from continuous improvement in eco‐efficiency activities is to be anticipated it is necessary for eco‐efficiency and budgeting to be integrated. The paper provides some conceptual and practical guidance to help managers achieve this integration. Recently a number of companies have suggested that corporate budgeting no longer serves a purpose in their organizations (e.g. in network organizations). By demonstrating that, if information related to the neglect of potential environmental protection activities is ignored, the costs to business can be very high, this suggested change in practice is considered. It is concluded that a set of contingent guidelines need to be developed for budgeted eco‐efficiency situations to help management and regulators assess value‐added opportunities from using this new environmental management tool.