The mere mention of the term "accounting" is enough to glaze over the eyes of any environmental health and safety professional. Pouring over ledgers and running lists of numbers is not your thing, you say. You’re no bean counter. Perhaps not.
But environmental accounting is a practice with relevance to the EHS professional’s job -- a relevance especially apparent to anyone who has ever tried to identify, quantify and categorize the costs of environmentally sensitive equipment, processes or systems and failed. Here is a basic environmental accounting primer to help you succeed. The reason it is so hard to locate detailed environmental cost information in a company’s financial system has to do with how a company stores and manipulates the vast cost information it collects.