CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

People will always need the environment for resources and this holds true
even for businesses . Business resources like raw materials come from the environment
and when processed to finished products, may produce waste, and this waste, together
with the finished product will eventually return to the environment. Businesses, however,
tend to produce a lot of these wastes. Therefore, since businesses benefit from a
healthy environment and, at the same time, have huge impact on the destruction of
such, hence should recognize taking care of environment as a moral and social
responsibility. Local, national and international law-making bodies have made
regulations to address such. However, for different companies, adhering to these
regulations produces different degrees of cost and benefit.
In this case, the researchers would assess and study the extent of
compliance of the establishments by reviewing observance of the related regulations
regarding hard-to-recycle materials through International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) 14000 and ISO 14001.
ISO 14001 maps out a framework that a company can follow to set up an
effective environment management system (EMS) while ISO 14000 is a family of
standards related to environmental management that exists to help organizations (a)
minimize how their operations (processes, etc.) negatively affect the environment (i.e.,
cause adverse changes to air, water, or land); (b) comply with applicable laws,
regulations, and other environmentally oriented requirements, and (c) continually
improve in the above. EMS refer to the management of an

organization's environmental programs in a comprehensive, systematic, planned and

documented manner which is typically reported using ISO 14001 to help understand
the EMS process.
The researchers will be conducting impact assessment to evaluate the
intended and unintended, positive and negative impacts of policies on economic, social,
and environmental aspects, to inform policy development. In measuring the economic
impact of the compliance, this study would base itself on the established generally
accepted accounting principles (GAAP), the International Financial Reporting Standards
(IFRS), the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach and the environment full-cost
accounting.
TBL incorporates the notion of sustainability into business decisions.
Essentially, it is an accounting framework with three dimensions: social, environmental
(or ecological) and financial. In this study, we would be using the TBL in relation the
environmental accounting. Environmental full-cost accounting (EFCA) which is a
method of cost accounting that traces direct costs and allocates indirect costs by
collecting and presenting information about the possible environmental, social and
economic cost and benefits or advantages
With these assessment of environmental audits that are based on the
standards (i.e., ISO 14000, ISO 14001), the statutory laws, and internal policies
compliance (employment of TBL Approach and EMS), the researchers may measure
and evaluate economic impact using the GAAP, IFRS and EFCA.