scope:

The objective of this guideline is to offer assistance in determining as comprehensively as possible the costs caused by environmental protection measures. These may be measures that have already been implemented or that have been planned. The aim is to establish a generally applicable approach for determining and presenting these costs. Which method of cost determination is most suitable for a particular company can only be decided on the basis of the costbenefit ratio. This decision shall consider which cost items are entered regularly into the accounts and which expenditures have to calculated individually before being recorded. At a fundamental level, costs can be differentiated into

• those that can be unambiguously delimited,

• those that can be calculated or properly estimated only if particular conditions have been satisfied, and

• those which cannot normally be determined in an objective manner because of problems of delimitation (see Section 3.1.2 and Section 3.2 for further information).

This guideline can serve as the basis for:

a) internal reporting

b) documentation for approval or licensing procedures

c) formulation of sector-specific legislation

d) external reporting

e) comparing companies, their operations and their plants and facilities

f) decision-making during the project planning phase

The regulations presented in this guideline apply both to companies and to their organisational units such as production plants or factories. They are also applicable to mergers incorporating groups of affiliated companies. For the sake of simplicity, however, only the term "company" will be used in the following.

The guideline applies not only to manufacturing industry but also, by analogy, to the service sector. It does not contain regulations on matters that are sector- specific, though these can be taken into account in certain cases.