Environmental sustainability is not only a potential competitive advantage to an organization, but might also be a regulatory requirement. The creation of business processes to support environmental sustainability requires the expenditure of resources and management is faced with evaluating the costs and benefits of such efforts. See the article, "An Activity Based Management Methodology for Evaluating Business Processes for Environmental Sustainability," by Joseph Sarkis, Laura Meade, and Adrien Presley, Business Process Management Journal 12, no. 6 (2006), pp. 751-766, for some advice on how managers can deal with these issues. Read the article and then answer the following questions.

Required

1. What is the purpose of environmental cost accounting and why is it important?

2. What are some of the obvious and what are some of the "hidden" environmental costs?

3. The authors reference a categorization developed by the EPA, which classifi es costs based on the ease of measurement. Diffi culty of measurement does not relieve management of the responsibility to adequately evaluate the costs of a proposed course of action (or inaction). How might the concepts of ABC and ABM be applied to help managers evaluate environmental costs?