Niklas Letmathe

2023

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the most prominent standard in CO2 accounting, but it also has some difficulties. The E-liability concept of Kaplan and Ramanna is a potential alternative, which takes cost accounting as role model. However, there are only few practical implementations to be found in the literature. This is why we conduct a case study with Polymer-Chemie GmbH, a plastic compounding company. We propose improvements to the current cost accounting system as well as changes to adapt the existing Greenhouse Gas Protocol motivated CO2 accounting system to an E-liability motivated CO2 accounting system. Comparing E-liability motivated CO2 accounting to cost accounting we see that that emissions can be categorized in direct and indirect emissions analogously to costs. The allocation of emissions to products can be derived from cost accounting using similar resource allocation schemes, leading to intriguing concepts like emission depreciation. Yet nowadays one of the biggest challenges in the implementation of CO2 accounting systems is the scarce availability of upstream product carbon footprint data. This highlights the requirement of a wide-range application of CO2 accounting. Moreover, we see that emission information is often not of primary interest for companies, which could be addressed through imposing costs on emissions for example through emission certificates.