Research On Environmental Cost Management Based On Product Life Cycle

With the rapid economic development and continuous growth of population, depletion of natural resources and environment pollution are becoming increasingly serious. How to effectively manage enterprises' environmental cost has turned into an emerging research topic. People have realized that enterprises' production and operation are the most important factors which cause the environment pollution and enterprises must be responsible for environmental protection, so enterprises' environmental behaviors are restricted by international communities, governments and consumers. Enterprises have to take environmental impact which are created by their own production and operation under the multi-pressure from society, government and self-development. Environmental cost management has become an important part of business management.Business goal is simply to maximize economic benefits for a long time. Enterprises only consider the economic costs and economic interests while designing, manufacturing, selling, using and recalling their products, but don't take environmental factors into consideration. In other words, the traditional cost management does not include the environmental cost management. With the serious environmental deterioration and pollution, people have come to realize that environmental protection is very important and enterprises need to manage environmental costs all over the stages of product life cycle and to put environmental factors into enterprises' production and management so as to gain a win-win situation between economic interests and environmental effects and to achieve sustainable development.This thesis mainly discusses some problems about accounting and decision-making models of environmental cost based on product life cycle thinking based on review of references about environmental cost management at home and abroad. The thesis elaborates the definition and the specific contents of environmental costs based on product life cycle and the objective of modern environmental cost management, analyses environmental costs factors based on product life cycle, examines the factors which influence environmental costs based on product life cycle, discusses the methods and means of environmental cost accounting and decision-making based on product life cycle, discusses the current status and defects of enterprises' environmental cost accounting, probes the application of Activity-based Costing in the accounting of enterprises' environmental cost on product life cycle, that is, how to recognize, measure, aggregate and distribute environmental costs, and establishes the decision-making models of environmental cost based on Entropy Law.The final section of the thesis selects Baoshan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd. as a sample and analyses its current status and problems of environmental cost management and provides the measures to improve its environmental cost management.