Environmental full-cost accounting

Environmental full-cost accounting (EFCA) is a method of cost accounting that traces direct costs and allocates indirect costs by collecting and presenting information about the possible environmental, social and economical costs and benefits or advantagesin short, about the "triple bottom line"for each proposed alternative. It is also known as true-cost accounting (TCA), but, as definitions for "true" and "full" are inherently subjective, experts consider both terms problematical.
Since costs and advantages are usually considered in terms of environmental, economic and social impacts, full or true cost efforts are collectively called the "triple bottom line". Many standards now exist in this area including Ecological Footprint, eco-labels, and the United Nations International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives approach to triple bottom line using the ecoBudget metric. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has several accredited standards useful in FCA or TCA including for greenhouse gases, the ISO 26000 series for corporate social responsibility coming in 2010, and the ISO 19011 standard for audits including all these.
Because of this evolution of terminology in the public sector use especially, the term full-cost accounting is now more commonly used in management accounting, e.g. infrastructure management and finance. Use of the terms FCA or TCA usually indicate relatively conservative extensions of current management practices, and incremental improvements to GAAP to deal with waste output or resource input.
These have the advantage of avoiding the more contentious questions of social cost.
Concepts.
Full-cost accounting embodies several key concepts that distinguish it from standard accounting techniques. The following list highlights the basic tenets of FCA.
Accounting for:
Costs rather than outlays.
Expenditure of cash to acquire or use a resource. A cost is the cash value of the resource as it is used. For example, an outlay is made when a vehicle is purchased, but the cost of the vehicle is incurred over its active life (e.g., ten years). The cost of the vehicle must be allocated over a period of time because every year of its use contributes to the depreciation of the vehicle's value.
Hidden costs.
The value of goods and services is reflected as a cost even if no cash outlay is involved. One community might receive a grant from a state, for example, to purchase equipment. This equipment has value, even though the community did not pay for it in cash. The equipment, therefore, should be valued in an FCA analysis.
Government subsidies in the energy and food production industries keep true costs low through artificially cheap product pricing. This price manipulation encourages unsustainable practices and further hides negative externalities endemic to fossil fuel production and modern mechanized agriculture.
Overhead and indirect costs.
FCA accounts for all overhead and indirect costs, including those that are shared with other public agencies. Overhead and indirect costs might include legal services, administrative support, data processing, billing, and purchasing. Environmental costs as indirect costs include the full range of costs throughout the life-cycle of a product (Life cycle assessment), some of which even do not show up in the firm's bottom line. It also contains fixed overhead, fixed administration expense etc.
Past and future outlays.
Past and future cash outlays often do not appear on annual budgets under cash accounting systems. Past (or upfront) costs are initial investments necessary to implement services such as the acquisition of vehicles, equipment, or facilities. Future (or back-end) outlays are costs incurred to complete operations such as facility closure and postclosure care, equipment retirement, and post-employment health and retirement benefits.
Examples.
Waste management.
The State of Florida uses the term full-cost accounting for its solid waste management. In this instance, FCA is a systematic approach for identifying, summing, and reporting the actual costs of solid waste management. It takes into account past and future outlays, overhead (oversight and support services) costs, and operating costs.
Integrated solid waste management systems consist of a variety of municipal solid waste (MSW) activities and paths. Activities are the building blocks of the system, which may include waste collection, operation of transfer stations, transport to waste management facilities, waste processing and disposal, and sale of byproducts. Paths are the directions that MSW follows in the course of integrated solid waste management (i.e., the point of generation through processing and ultimate disposition) and include recycling, composting, waste-to-energy, and landfill disposal. The cost of some activities is shared between paths. Understanding the costs of MSW activities is often necessary for compiling the costs of the entire solid waste system, and helps municipalities evaluate whether to provide a service itself or contract out for it. However, in considering changes that affect how much MSW ends up being recycled, composted, converted to energy, or landfilled, the analyst should focus the costs of the different paths. Understanding the full costs of each MSW path is an essential first step in discussing whether to shift the flows of MSW one way another.
Food and Agriculture.
Over the last ten years there has been considerable attention for Full Cost Accounting (FCA) or True Cost Accounting (TCA) in the field of food and agriculture. In 2013 and 2016, the Sustainable Food Trust organised two conferences on True Cost Accounting in food and farming, in the UK and the USA respectively. The FAO published two studies in 2014 and 2015 with a TCA-analysis of the impact of food wastage ("Food wastage footprint: full cost accounting" ) and another TCA-analysis of the total impact of world food production on Natural Capital ("Natural Capital Impacts in Agriculture" ). In the first report, the FAO comes to the conclusion that the yearly hidden impact of food wastage on Natural Capital amounts to USD 700 billion while the hidden impact on social capital amounts to USD 900 billion dollars. In the second report, the FAO estimates the environmental damage of the world food production at USD 2330 billion per year.
Motives for adoption.
Various motives for adoption of FCA/TCA have been identified. The most significant of which tend to involve anticipating market or regulatory problems associated with ignoring the comprehensive outcome of the whole process or event accounted for. "In green economics, this is the major concern and basis for critiques of such measures as GDP." The public sector has tended to move more towards longer term measures to avoid accusations of political favoritism towards specific solutions that seem to make financial or economic sense in the short term, but not longer term.
Corporate decision makers sometimes call on FCA/TCA measures to decide whether to initiate recalls, practice voluntary product stewardship (a form of recall at the end of a product's useful life). This can be motivated as a hedge against future liabilities arising from those who are negatively affected by the waste a product becomes. Advanced theories of FCA, such as Natural Step, focus firmly on these. According to Ray Anderson, who instituted a form of FCA/TCA at Interface Carpet, used it to rule out decisions that increase Ecological Footprint and focus the company more clearly on a sustainable marketing strategy.
The urban ecology and industrial ecology approaches inherently advocate FCA — treating the built environment as a sort of ecosystem to minimize its own wastes.