AN EVALUATION OF THE IMPACT OF ENVIRONMENTAL ACCOUNTING ON THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY..

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUNDS OF THE STUDY

        Managers within organization are coming under increased pressure to not only reduce costs, but also to minimize the environmental impacts on their operations. Unfortunately, a substantial impact on the environment has left Nigeria with an enormous economic, social, and environmental legacy. Most environmental degradations and emissions are anthropogenic, an advent traceable to the industrial revolution of late 18th century where economic activities in many communities moved from agriculture to manufacturing. Production shifted from its traditional locations in the home and the small workshop to factories. The overall amount of goods and services produced expanded dramatically. New groups of investors, businesspeople, and managers took financial risks and reaped great rewards.In the long run the industrial revolution has brought economic improvement for most people in industrialized societies. Many enjoy greater prosperity and improved health. There have been costs, however. Industrialization has brought factory pollutants and greater land use, which have harmed the natural environment (Mastrandrea and Schneider, 2008).

Environmental accounting is an inclusive field of accounting. It provides reports for both internal use, generating environmental information to help make management decisions on pricing, controlling overhead and capital budgeting, and external use, disclosing environmental information of interest to the public and to the financial community. Internal use is better termed environmental management accounting (Bartolomeo et al., 2000).

Environmental accounting is the identification and reporting of environment specific costs, such as liability costs or waste disposal costs. It is also defined is as accounting for any costs and benefits that arise from changes to a firm's products or processes, where the change also involves a change in environmental impacts. Environmental accounting is a subset of accounting proper, its target being to incorporate both economic and environmental information. It can be conducted at the corporate level or at the level of a national economy through the National Accounts of Countries (among other things, the National Accounts produce the estimates of Gross Domestic Product otherwise known as GDP).

Environmental accounting is a field that identifies resource use, measures and communicates costs of a company’s or national economic impact on the environment. Costs include costs to clean up or remediate contaminated sites, environmental fines, penalties and taxes, purchase of pollution prevention technologies and waste management costs. An environmental accounting system is consisted of environmentally differentiated conventional accounting and ecological accounting. Environmentally differentiated accounting measures effects of the natural environment on a company in monetary terms. Ecological accounting measures the influence a company has on the environment, but in physical measurements, (Wikipedia, 2013).The accounting environment can include activities such as accounting systems that enhance the ability to detect Recording and reporting the work of destruction and environmental pollution and environmental-based integration as a source of Capital and consideration of environmental costs as an acceptable cost of computational processes and economic,  (Sajad, et al , 2013).