Enviromental Accounting

Master's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, grade: 2,3, Leeds Metropolitan University, language: English, abstract: The growth in environmental accounting research and interest in the last few decades has experienced an optimistic time. Business is not an isolated island apart from the earth any more; the emergency of environmental accounting came from outside stakeholder at the end of 20th century. Following with the rising sense of environment conservation no matter from the public or the companies/organizations, environmental accounting has been pushed to a central stage of nowadays business. This paper firstly provides a brief view of the current development of environmental accounting. Addressed with some questions, it further gives a review of recent research in this area from other scholars and seeks to answer if environmental accounting benefits both the public and business, how to put it into practice for different industries by looking into ten successful companies from 'the global 100 list', which provides the first hundred most sustainable companies in the world wide. The ten companies that I pick up are mostly in the UK despite for one in Finland and another in the US and cover three main industries like the retail industry, food and soft drink manufacturing industry, and tobacco and alcohol industry. Finally the paper concludes with a positive view that it is really good a thing for both sides and also practical despite of the considerable cost. The companies/organizations could be benefit from improving their efficiency and getting better control. The public could get a better and more sustainable living circumstance. But the problem of environmental accounting is its expensive cost, which makes middle or small size companies/organizations not be able to do it. However, there is always something to expect that the improvement of environmental accounting in the future will hopefully solve this problem and cut the cost down. Key words: environment conservation, life-cycle assessment, ecological accounting.