Paying attention to environmental pay-offs: the case of an Indonesian textile manufacturer

Despite the growing recognition of economic risks related to insufficient corporate environmental performance and the opportunities resulting from improvements, many companies have been struggling in practice to act accordingly. Among the reasons for implementation deficiencies may be a lack of information on reduction potentials and insufficient interdisciplinary communication between environmental managers, production managers and accountants. This paper investigates with the exemplar of a case study of an Indonesian textile manufacturer how environmental management accounting (EMA) can support management in choosing adequate accounting tools for providing relevant information for cleaner production and as a consequence of this to overcome hesitation to substantially reduce environmental impacts. This paper illustrates how the EMA framework and various EMA techniques can support interdisciplinary collaboration between environmental managers, production managers and accountants in improving the overall performance of their organisations - both from a financial and from an environmental point of view. The case study reveals that the choice of EMA tools may have to be very specific depending on the decision situation. This is shown with specific EMA tools like monthly performance assessments, mid- and long-term eco-efficiency investments, and product pricing, all of which are rarely discussed in the academic literature.