Example of the pulp and paper company SCA Laakirchen
Within the Swedish pulp and paper company SCA, Quantification and interpretation of environmental costs related to investment decisions and their effects on waste, emissions and long term profits is an important issue. SCA Graphic Laakirchen, Austria, has been assessing environmental costs for year. Since 1999, they participated in the pilot testing for the EMA scheme for UN DSD and published the results in their environmental statement for 2000. The explanations and Table 3 are taken from there.
Table 3 shows the percent distribution of environmental costs for SCA laakirchen in the year 2000. The total environmental costs for 2000 were to Euro 23, 758.510, and are 30% above the costs for 1999. This strong increase is due to raised prices for raw and operating materials and natural gas.
The distribution by environmental media shows that the column water/waste is responsible for 44% of all environmental costs. Annual operating costs for the waste water treatment plant count for 13%, but the purchase costs of the paper chemicals going down with waste water account for 32% of the costs. A reduction of paper chemicals is therefore much more important when searching for potential for cost reduction.
Wasted materials account for 30% of all environmental costs. Disposal fees are only 3.6%, but the major share is raw materials in the waste fraction (26.6% including processing costs).
Under the category air and climate the efficiency losses of the site’s gas combustion are assessed. The sharp increase in the price for gas has raised the share of this cost category from 19.9% in 1999 to 24.6% in 2000. The costs of external electricity purchase have not been added, as it is mainly used for administration, not production, and the efficiency loss could not be estimated seriously in the cost assessment.
Analysing the environmental costs by cost categories makes obvious that the highest share is the material purchase value of non-product output (80.4%), which is calculated from all raw, auxiliary and operating materials in the mass balance that don’t leave the company within the product.
The earnings in the waste and waste water columns arise from selling of recyclable materials and from providing treatment capacity of the waste water plant to other companies nearby. The research project on electrochemical waste water treatment, which is also included under costs for research and development, was partly funden by the Austrian Industrial research promotion Fonds.