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 eco efficient decisions are being made, then total 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-valueadded 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,