Full Cost Accounting - Motives For Adoption

Motives For Adoption

Various motives for adoption of FCA/TCA have been identified. The most significant of which tend to involve anticipating market or regulatory problems associated with ignoring the comprehensive outcome of the whole process or event accounted for. In green economics, this is the major concern and basis for critiques of such measures as GDP. The public sector has tended to move more towards longer term measures to avoid accusations of political favoritism towards specific solutions that seem to make financial or economic sense in the short term, but not longer term.

Corporate decision makers sometimes call on FCA/TCA measures to decide whether to initiate recalls, practice voluntary product stewardship (a form of recall at the end of a product's useful life). This can be motivated as a hedge against future liabilities arising from those who are negatively affected by the waste a product becomes. Advanced theories of FCA, such as Natural Step, focus firmly on these. According to Ray Anderson, who instituted a form of FCA/TCA at Interface Carpet, used it to rule out decisions that increase Ecological Footprint and focus the company more clearly on a sustainable marketing strategy.

The urban ecology and industrial ecology approaches inherently advocate FCA — treating the built environment as a sort of ecosystem to minimize its own wastes.