The term environmental accounting, green accounting, ecological accounting ... refers to including within its own accounting elements of the company that refer to the environmental impact produced by its actions. In this way, the gains or losses referred to in the accounting results will not be strictly "monetary", but also environmental. It is a reflection of the increasingly notorious effort of thecompaniesfor being more involved in respecting the environment, even in the internal accounts of the company.
In order to carry this out, it should be noted that the involvement of the business strategy in the so-called green projects, those that involve the company in acts that respect or favor the use of natural resources in society, is of utmost importance. It also refers to those practices that allude to a good behavior of the company with the environment (such as reducing the use of plastics in its products, not testing against animals, etc.).
Thanks to these green projects, the company will be able to achieve environmental benefits compared to other companies that do not take this type of practice into account. In general, environmental accounting measures the use of resources, as well as their impact and the costs that this entails.
Among the costs, the company may include impuestos that must pay the government for its practices, the waste it throws into the ecosystem, the use or purchase of green technology, as well as the fines caused by the acts it performs, etc ...
Environmental accounting is made up of an ecological account and an adapted conventional account. The adapted conventional one tries to measure the impact on the environment in monetary terms of the actions carried out by the company. The ecological one measures the same but in physical terms (how many kilograms of waste it expels, how much energy it has consumed, how many harmful gases it has emitted ...)