Environmental Profit & Loss accounts (E P&L)

We provide Environmental Profit & Loss accounts (E P&L) and Natural Capital Accounts (NCA) that cover the life cycle impacts for the entire product portfolio for a company or an industry.

Projects

• Environmental account for Danish Ministry of Defense December 2018
  The Danish Ministry of Defense wanted a life cycle‑based environmental account covering all their activities in 2017. The results are two proprietary reports ‑ a performance report and a method report.
• Environmental Impacts of Alcoholic Beverages December 2016
  The purpose of the study was to document the total environmental impact of the product portfolio of the alcohol monopolies. The environmental impacts was expressed in monetary units, in addition to the underlying physical units.  
• E P&L for Arla Foods May 2016
  An Environmental Product & Loss account (E P&L) was conducted by Arla Foods, the third largest dairy cooperative in the world, with the aim of documenting the total environmental impact of Arla Foods.
• E P&L for Sollentuna Municipality December 2014
  The Municipality of Sollentuna (Sweden) has previously used LCA to estimate the environmental footprint of their activities. In this study we used the same data to estimate the Environmental Profit & Loss. The overall project results are published in a report.
• E P&L on the Danish Apparel Consumption October 2014
  This project consisted of an industrial E P&L for the Danish apparel consumption conducted across three levels: industry, company/brand and product.  
• Environmental Profit and Loss Account (E P&L) for Novo Nordisk February 2014
  This project was a collaborative effort, looking into Novo Nordisk's value chain, leading to the first Novo Nordisk Environmental Profit and Loss Account (E P&L).
• Monetary valuation
  In 2006 we developed our first life cycle impact assessment method with option for full monetarisation of all impact categories. Now we are updating it and offer everyone to join the further developments the field of monetary valuation in our Monetarisation Club.
• Social footprinting
  We have developed the first complete, quantitative, top‑down social impact assessment method and make the data available in our Social LCA Club.

Product portfolio assessments

An Environmental Profit & Loss account (E P&L) complements the normal Product & Loss account of a company with an account of the monetarised external benefits and costs related to the life cycle of the product portfolio of the company. It can be described as an environmental life cycle assessment of all the products in the product portfolio with monetary valuation of the impacts. Except for the monetary valuation of the impacts, an E P&L is thus equivalent to what the European Commission calls an Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF).

An E P&L thus goes beyond the product gates, beyond the individual products, and beyond the typical multi-indicator approaches to the full life cycle, to the full product portfolio and to full monetary valuation of the environmental impacts. The first acknowledged corporate E P&L was published by PUMA with their: “PUMA’s Environmental Profit and Loss Account for the year ended 31 December 2010”. In cooperation with Trucost and NIRAS we were among the first consultancies to provide E P&Ls with the above-mentioned projects. Our particular strength is that we can provide detailed environmental inventories that are fully mass, energy and water balanced, which is a good measure of their completeness and consistency, and essential if the results are to be used for practical decision-making. In our project for Arla Foods we used our own method for monetary valuation, Stepwise2006.

Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) is sometimes used as a synonym for E P&L, but can also be defined more narrowly as that part of an EP&L that is concerned with natural capital impacts, dependencies and assets. Natural capital covers all abiotic natural resources (minerals, soils, air, water) as well as biodiversity and other ecosystem resources that provide us with ‘ecosystem services’. Natural capital is thus an extension of the economic notion of manufactured capital (products which enable the production of more products) and NCA provides a monetary valuation of the impacts on these capital assets.

An E P&L will capture the magnitude of the environmental externalities and where in the supply chain they occur. Therefore an NCA or E P&L can be used by stakeholders to make informed environmental choices as well as by businesses for hotspot identification.