Notwithstanding the widespread belief that environmental accounting system is a practical scheme indispensable for enhancing corporate sustainability, little progress has been made on a study pertaining to aggregate methods that integrate interaction ...
Notwithstanding the widespread belief that environmental accounting system is a practical scheme indispensable for enhancing corporate sustainability, little progress has been made on a study pertaining to aggregate methods that integrate interaction of environmental and economic systems.
In light of this, this study aims at establishing the conceptual framework of emergy cost accounting (ECA), a new accounting system from ecological point of view. The study also aims to evaluate the applicability of ECA as a means to manage corporate production and consumption activities under an integrated system inclusive of environment and economy. These allowed the study to form the groundwork for the establishment of scientific and practical accounting system that enables sustainable environmental management and decision making of businesses. Accordingly, the study finds the solution for objective measurement of internalization of externality in the emergy theory and further provides a method for measuring environmental cost.
As a result of analyzing cognitive change in corporate environment, it was found out that economic standpoint could be branched off into environmental and social perspectives and that environmental decision-making based on such existing standpoint is insufficient in assessing the effect of environmental improvements. On the contrary, this study proved that rational decision could be derived through eco-environmental perspective as such perspective could provide a singular measure of cost required for environmental conservation and the consumption of environmental resources on a basis of emergy analysis value.
According to existing energy unit applied generally at present, the quantity of energy unit consumed by case corporations is determined largely by coal, natural gas and electricity by the highest rank. The outcome of ECA analysis tells a different story. According to ECA analysis, the level of emergy contribution declined in order of iron ore, coal and limestone. This attests to the fact that, when comparing energies based on the same energy unit regardless of their different capacity, the value of energy contributing to an enterprise cannot be appropriately assessed.
Whereas the conventional cost accounting does not specify waste disposal cost as it is assimilated into product cost, the holistic analysis of case study corporations using ECA estimated the reuse value and energy recovery value of a by-product at 26 trillion Em₩ and 25.9 trillion Em₩ respectively. In particular, environmental cost data with regards to by-products classified by different processes serves as well-grounded information in weighing the benefits of disposal against reuse through investment in terms of managing by-products. This thesis ascertained such fact as it proved the value of a by-product at 0.7432 trillion Em₩ when ECA was applied in coke manufacturing process.
EYR and ELR enables comparison between interrelated enterprises and serves as useful data in assessing the systemic improvement through annual and monthly comparisons. It must be kept in mind, however, that ECA could provide useful data for enterprises that put great emphasis on corporate social responsibility of global conservation and ecological value of natural environment as one of important corporate management but that ECA is meaningless to those with less emphasis on such values. Nonetheless, sustainability management data from ECA enables internal corporate analysis from a new ecological perspective and paves the way for realizing sustainable business practices of corporations.