Valuing external costs - from theory to practice: implications for full cost environmental accounting

This article presents an experiment in full cost accounting applied to the case of an industrial process. It aims at exploring the difficulties of putting full cost accounting into practice. Its specific contribution to the growing body of experiments in full cost accounting is that it attempts to compare exactly what impacts can be translated into financial information with the impacts that are being left out. Amongst other things, we provide a quantitative figure of what is monetized in the experiment, expressed as a percentage of what should be monetized if all negative external effects were to be taken into account. The experiment uses three different external cost evaluation methods. The most comprehensive method monetizes less than 10% of the flows of the industrial process studied. According to the method used and the assumptions made, external costs vary by a factor of more than 1 to 12,000 per unit of product. The paper then discusses what can be learnt by comparing the range of results obtained with each method and suggests directions for future research.