Sustainable Development, Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Sustainability are concepts that converge towards the same objective: to integrate economic, social and ecological aspects of business. Many companies maintain actions aimed at environmental protection. To contribute to corporate sustainability, however, these activities should converge to eco-efficiency. Therefore, the company's ecological activities should act on the waste produced by company operations and the incurred expenses should result in economic-financial benefits for the business. In this context, this article identifies the following research question: in accounting terms, how can the company's ecological actions be categorized to provide information on events related to the eco-efficiency of the business? Attempts are made to answer this question through a (holistic) Multiple Case study (type 3), with the following goal: corporate ecological actions (AEE) were classified according to their objectives, that is, treatment of own waste, deriving from internal actions; and actions resulting from external events, such as the preservation of green areas, recovery of contaminated areas, environmental education programs aimed at the external community. This can allow managers to verify the eco-efficiency of the operating process itself (internal AEE) and the aspect related to global environmental management (internal and external AEE). Three types of material are analyzed and 608 examples of ecological actions are identified, performed by 181 companies. The empirical research reported in this article reveals that the proposal is in line with practice and results in an accounting system to manage companies' eco-efficiency.
Corporate Sustainability; Eco-efficiency; Environmental Management Accounting; Case Study Research
