Kohji Hayase

Graduate School of Biosphere Sciences, Hiroshima University
(1-7-1, Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima, 724 Japan)

Abstract

This paper describes environmental auditing for easy and concrete understanding, since environmental auditing has attracted increasing attension worldwide over the past few years. While this new auditing has been much discussed, there is not yet a common understanding of its principles, methodology and effectiveness. Generally speaking, environmental auditing is a new tool to evaluate and make public how organizations are performing to safeguard the environment. After the past and current environmental auditing was presented, the concepts of the "system" and the "environment" are explained. Significance of each portion of incoming, production and outgoing is represented as a relation between the "system" and the "environment" . Proposed is a balance sheet of materials and energies (namely, environmental balance accounting), which describes items in detail what comes and goes between the "system" = "social system" and the "environment" . For instance, the environmental balance accounting of a manufacturing enterprise in Switzerland and of an office company in Tokyo is evaluated for how easy it is to understand and its potential effectiveness in global environmental protection programs.

Key words: environmental auditing, system and environment, incoming and outgoing, ecological accounting, environmental balance accounting