Financial Measures Environmental improvements ought to produce significant and beneficial financial consequences. This means that the firm has achieved a favorable trade-off among failure activities and prevention activities. If ecoefficient decisions are being made, then environmental costs should diminish as environmental performance improves” Thus, environmental cost trends are an important performance measure. One possibility is preparing a non-value-added environmental cost report for the current period and comparing these costs with the non-value-added costs of the prior period. An example of such a report is shown in Exhibit 17-9. Some care must be taken in measuring costs and trends. Cost reductions should be attributable to environmental improvements and not simply to discharging some environmental liability. Thus, external failure costs should reflect the average annual obligations resulting from current environmental efficiency. Therefore, the cost of cleaning up water pollution in 2007 is the expected annual cost assuming current environmental performance remains the same. The $900,000 cleanup cost, for example,
Exhibit 17-9 Non-Value- Added Cost Trends : Environmental Costs
could be the annual amount that must be set aside to have the total funds necessary to execute a cleanup five years from now. As actions are taken to improve environmental performance, the amount of future cleanup may diminish, thus reducing the annual amount to $700,000. The $200,000 trend improvement, then, is attributable
Another possibility is computing total environmental costs as a percentage of sales and tracking this value over several periods. Exhibit 17-10 illustrates such a trend graph. This graph is of particular interest because it tracks all environmental costs and not just non-value-added environmental costs. If ecoefficient decisions are being made, we should observe a reduction in total environmental costs. This implies that there is a favorable trade-off between investments in environmentally related prevention activities and reduction of environmental failure costs. The trend should be downward, as ecoefficient investments are made.
Other graphical illustrations for specific areas can also show progress made. For example, a bar graph can be used to show the total amount of a pollutant emitted on a year-by-year basis. A downward trend would be a favorable indication. Pie
Environmental Costs/Sales
Charts can be useful as well. For example, a pie chart could visually display hazardous waste management by category: percentage of waste incinerated, percentage of waste recycled/reclaimed, percentage of waste landfilled, percentage of waste treated, and percentage of waste deep-well injected. Exhibit 17-11 illustrates a bar graph analysis of CFC (chlorofluorocarbon) released over a four-year period, and Exhibit 17-12 shows a pie chart for hazardous waste management.