Abstract
This paper introduces five issues related to municipal waste management accounting. These are: 1) Methods of cost allocation for each waste item, especially cost allocation for each car, and survey methods for determining the volume-weight ratio of each waste item; 2) Depreciation method of landfills; 3) Demolition costs for waste treatment plants, and costs for the continuous monitoring and treatment of leachate from landfills; 4) Methods for consolidating costs relating to the regional affairs association; 5) Costs for source reduction policies. The paper also explains how municipal waste management accounting standards deal with these issues, and addresses what is left to focus on for further studies.
This article describes the situation surrounding benchmarking in waste management, and profiles the case of INFA's waste logistics benchmarking project in Germany. It also qualifies the meaning and the availability of the municipal general waste management accounting standard on benchmarking for waste management. If a database of municipal waste management costs calculated with this standard becomes available, each municipality will be able to clearly understand what parts of its performance are efficient and what parts are not. In addition, municipalities could search out efficient cases from within the database in order to learn from them.
