Environmental accounting—making it work for your company

There is no simple recipe for success in implementing environmental accounting. Day-to-day needs and strategic objectives will determine how an organization can benefit from environmental accounting. Our previous article listed many potential applications of environmental accounting and discussed common environmental accounting objectives.1 This article is geared toward organizations that want to start implementing environmental accounting and create a foundation of success on which to build. In this context, the questions are (1) What are some logical starting points? and (2) Where do companies go from there? This article first describes some paradigms that may guide companies as they think about how to implement environmental accounting, then it presents a series of critical activities that are needed to make environmental accounting an integral part of ongoing business management functions.