GC: n

CT: According to some EPA guidelines due to the importance of accurate cost information in making the decisions sketched out above, the term “environmental cost” has been introduced into the vocabulary of environmental managers.
Today we are starting a series of posts related to the definition(s) and the measurements used to evaluate environmental costs.
Environmental costs are often hard to define from a business stand point. In the past 10 years they are more likely to be qualified as a subset of the costs of operating a business. When substances are released into the air, water or land, the resulting pollution used to be considered a social cost, an externality. But some of the new regulations has resulted in internalization of some of these environmental externalities, through, for example, requirement of additional investment in equipment or training, or for fines and fees resulting from noncompliance. As environmental externalities become internalized, and investors start to pay attention to the environmental risks of their “investments” new costs emerge.

S: http://www.microempowering.org/external-blog/what-are-environmental-costs-part-1 (last access: 17 February 2015)

N: 1. environmental (adj): 1887, “environing, surrounding,” from environment (c.1600, “state of being environed”; sense of “the aggregate of the conditions in which a person or thing lives” first recorded 1827 (used by Carlyle to render German Umgebung); specialized ecology sense first recorded 1956) + -al (suffix forming adjectives from nouns or other adjectives, “of, like, related to, pertaining to,” Middle English -al, -el, from French or directly from Latin -alis). Ecological sense by 1967. Related: Environmentally (1884).
cost (n): c.1200, from Old French cost (12c., Modern French coût) “cost, outlay, expenditure; hardship, trouble,” from Vulgar Latin costare, from Latin constare, literally “to stand at” (or with), with a wide range of figurative senses including “to cost.”
2. Environmental costs are costs connected with the actual or potential deterioration of natural assets due to economic activities.
Such costs can be viewed from two different perspectives, namely as:

• costs caused, that is, costs associated with economic units actually or potentially causing environmental deterioration by their own activities;
• costs borne, that is, costs incurred by economic units independently of whether they have actually caused the environmental impacts.

3. Also frequently used in plural: “environmental costs”.

S: 1. OED – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=environmental+cost&searchmode=none (last access: 17 February 2015). 2. http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=819 (last access: 17 February 2015). 3. http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=819 (last access: 17 February 2015); http://www.microempowering.org/external-blog/what-are-environmental-costs-part-1 (last access: 17 February 2015); FCB.

SYN:
S:

CR: ecology, environment.