How Environmental Accounting Can Benefit Your Business (outdoor animals)
No commentsBy Jamie Hanson
It is no great secret that businesses are created to deliver products and services in order to earn a profit. However it is important that companies think about their balance sheet in terms of whether they are in the red or the black and also the “green”, too. With the growing green consumer awareness, companies are now expected to align their business strategies with environmental schemes.
Environmentally conscious businesses have already discovering that they are able to initiate strategies to help them reduce their carbon footprint, minimise their environmental impact, make the best use of natural or local resources, become more energy efficient, reduce costs, and display social responsibility - all at the same time.
More and more companies want to know how they can be part of a growing movement of doing green business and benefiting from the change. The first step is to consider green accounting into their business model.
What is Environmental Accounting?
The term, Environmental accounting, is a way of describing changes to your business practices that would be more environmentally friendly. This could be improving environmental performance, controlling costs, investing in technologies that require less energy or produce fewer emissions. Doing greener business is not about increased costs and can attract a new customer base that would have never considered you before.
Environmental Management Accounting
According to the EPA, environmental management accounting is “the identification, prioritisation, quantification or qualification, and incorporation of environmental costs into business decisions.” Environmental Management Accounting uses “data about environmental costs and performance for business decisions. It collects cost, production, inventory, and waste cost and performance for business decisions. It collects cost, production, inventory, and waste cost and performance data in the accounting system to plan, evaluate, and control.”
Environmental management accounting therefore represents a combined approach which provides the switch from conventional accounting to consider things such as increase material efficiency, reduction in environmental impact and risk, and reduction in costs of waste.
Implementing Environmental Accounting
When making the move to implement environmental accounting there is a lot to consider and for big businesses it makes sense to consult specialist help. You need to consider the working site, research and development, and how staff will be informed and even trained. In the past, green initiatives were hampered by lack of understanding by management, who would normally consider them to be costly and a waste of time.
Environmental accounting can help management recognise that the tax benefits, rebates and lower costs of being environmentally friendly add up to a real savings for being greener in business.
I have been involved in the waste industry for many years and has worked for many companies in the waste business. My latest interest in Environmental Management has made me realise how companies are changing and becoming more responsible.
Learn About Outdoor Creatures In Wildlife
Nuclear Power To Combat Climate Change
By Dominic Donaldson
Nuclear power has been heralded as the way to combat global warming whilst meeting the increasing energy demands of the world. The technologies currently in use are considered just as clean, if not cleaner than renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. But with concerns over the long term problems of disposing of nuclear waste, is nuclear power really the best fuel for the future. The development of small scale nuclear reactors in the USA could be an answer to the problem, enabling nuclear power to be a cleaner and safer option than ever before.
The only part of producing power from a nuclear reactor that creates carbon dioxide emissions is uranium enrichment. It has long been considered a dirty process, but some reactors in France have begun to use power generated by the plant itself to enrich the uranium on site. In doing this, the usual emission of 3.3 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour, already much better than the 400 of coal powered stations, essentially eradicates carbon dioxide emissions from the process altogether.
Nuclear power currently produces somewhere in the region of fifteen per cent of the world’s electricity, but in the bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there is a call for more fossil fuelled power plants to be replaced by nuclear technology. It is not only the affect on climate change that is spurring the call to action, it is the depletion of fossil fuel reserves too. Uranium is in plentiful supply and has the added advantage of not being connected to the volatile price changes associated with oil, gas and coal supplies. The result of this is that nuclear power has the potential to be a continuous source of electricity at a stable price.
The drawbacks associated with nuclear power are in the volatile nature of the process and in the disposal of the highly toxic waste. Disasters such as Chernobyl have made the general public wary of the introduction of new plants, but the creation of mini nuclear fission reactors could eliminate such risks, and cut the amount and toxicity of the waste produced. Originally, the design of the mini reactors was to find a solution for supplying hot water and electricity to remote locations and therefore had to adapt more traditional nuclear reaction to fit in a smaller unit.
Standard nuclear reactors use rods to slow down neutrons, and unless these are properly managed they can become unstable and become a hazard. The mini reactors do not contain rods, instead they rely on hydrogen atoms to control neutron behaviour. The reactor, which is no bigger than a garden shed is therefore transformed into a battery; with no moving parts and encased in concrete, a stable platform for providing heat and hot water has been achieved.
The waste from the reactors is just a fraction of the amount generated by fossil fuelled power stations, and in such small amounts is easier to store safely. Unfortunately there is some debate over whether the mini nuclear reactors are actually an efficient way of producing energy. With a life span of around 8 years, and a unit price of ten cents per kilowatt hour, some experts feel the technology needs to be developed further to be a viable competitor for energy production.
Undoubtedly the mini reactors are an ideal solution for providing energy to remote areas, but in the race to tackle carbon dioxide emissions to prevent global warming, the technology needs to be developed at a much faster pace
Dom Donaldson is an energy expert.
Find out more about Nuclear Power and the current projects underway in the energy utility sector at URS Corp.
Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under environmental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
