Green Business

The flip side of the hidden costs and impacts of waste generation is the hidden benefits resulting from actions taken to improve the environmental performance of your facility. This page includes links to calculators which can help you determine the positive outcomes of pollution prevention measures. Use these results to motivate your fellow employees to maintain good practices at your facility and to inspire further actions. From the Maryland Dept. of Environment.

This guide can help you identify major costs for your current processes and potential pollution prevention alternatives. It provides basic information about calculating payback while considering operational and oversight costs as well as environmental compliance requirements.

Links to additional environmental cost accounting publications on the Pollution Prevention 101 LibGuide

The objective of this report is to define principles and procedures for Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) with a focus on techniques for quantifying environmental expenditures or costs as a basis for the development of national EMA guidelines and frameworks. The intended users of these EMA procedures are national governments interested in establishing national EMA guidelines appropriate to their own countries’ context and organizations seeking to install EMA systems for better controlling and benchmarking purposes.

Did you ever wonder what reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 1 million metric tons means in everyday terms? The greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator can help you understand just that, translating abstract measurements into concrete terms you can understand, such as "equivalent to avoiding the carbon dioxide emissions of 183,000 cars annually."

Green Ledgers: Case Studies in Corporate Environmental Accounting offers an insider’s view of corporate environmental accounting. It is not about the information that firms report to the EPA or even to their stockholders, but about the information they gather for their own purposes and how they use it. To explore how different firms handle this task, WRI—together with teams of academic researchers and corporate staff—studies nine companies, including Amoco Oil, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, Du Pont, and S.C. Johnson. Derived from in-depth interviews and confidential information, the case studies demonstrate how a better accounting of environmental costs leads to better business decisions—critical since firms much continually look for ways to squeeze more product out of less raw material and energy.

This primer focuses on the application of environmental accounting as a managerial accounting tool for internal business decisions. Moreover, the term environmental cost has at least two major dimensions: (1) it can refer solely to costs that directly impact a company's bottom line (here termed "private costs"), or (2) it also can encompass the costs to individuals, society, and the environment for which a company is not accountable (here termed "societal costs"). The discussion in this primer concentrates on private costs because that is where companies starting to implement environmental accounting typically begin. However, much of the material is applicable to societal costs as well.

How companies are using environmental cost accounting.

P2 Calculator spread sheets are designed to help measure the environmental and economic performance results of P2 activities. These calculators can demonstrate the unique multi-media perspective that P2 brings to reduce GHG reductions and cost savings. Archived training webinar also available.