Ivan Smol ci ´c, Vlatko Zaimovi ´c, Morana Belamaric and v Boris Bjedov
A. Brief description of the company 1. About the company
HERBOS d.d. is a joint stock company (i.e. both privately and publicly owned), for the production of chemicals, mainly pest control products.
The company was founded in 1946. At that time, it was a manufacturer of tartaric acid and oxygen. Over the past 50 years, the company changed its name to “HERBOS d.d.” and has grown into a major manufacturer of pest control products, construction materials, paints and coatings and reagents for clinical diagnostics
The company statistics include:
Employees: Presently 340 employees
Annual Revenue: Approximately 150 million HRK.
Ownership: Approximately 70 per cent owned by small share-holders
Contact Person: Mr. Ivan Smolèiæ Telephone: +385 (0) 44 543 333 Email: ivan.smolcic1@sk.tel.hr
HERBOS d.d. operates as one unit, regardless of its various production pro-grammes.
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2. Environmental aspects of the company
The main environmental problem at HERBOS is wastewater discharge that originates from atrazine synthesis. At full operational capacity (approx.
450 m3/day), atrazine concentration in discharged wastewaters is 93.3 mg/l, which exceeds the permitted concentration level (10 mg/l) by almost ten times. In addition, regulations are to change by 2005, which will have an atrazine level of 0.05 mg/l, 200 times stricter than the current limit.
Different, cleaner production measures are planned to solve this problem.
Air pollution limits are covered by the law on Limit Values of Pollutant Emission from Stationary Sources into the Air.
Hazardous wastes generated in the processes include:
Tin drums, which are collected and kept separate until returned, or pressed and sold as secondary raw materials;
Glass packaging (from laboratories), which is kept in separate con-tainers and returned as a secondary raw material;
Other hazardous wastes removed from the point of generation and sent for destruction at the company’s incineration plant;
Ash from the incineration plant, which is sent to a class IV site for off-site disposal after physical and chemical analysis, classifies it as a process waste.
3. Current management accounting practice
There is a financial accounting department within HERBOS, supported by an automatic data processing system. The majority of existing environ-mental costs are allocated to cost centres, or to products, according to pre-determined keys, usually through the management or supporting serv-ices overhead. Allocation keys are not always clearly defined and there is no mechanism to regularly check them. Until now, there had not been an instance where environmental protection costs had been separated from other overheads in order to determine their real value and to enable correct allocation to cost centres and cost carriers.
The company as a whole is organized into six sectors, and each sector has several organizational units. Out of 66 total cost centres, 19 can be rec-ognized as having environmental costs/revenues. Table 16 shows these cost centres:
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B. Scoping EMA 1. Objectives
This project focused on the chemical synthesis of atrazine, a key product of HERBOS, whose concentration in discharge water significantly exceeds the permitted limits. In certain areas, however, broadening the project scope to include the whole company was inevitable to provide a high quality analysis of all atrazine related environmental protection costs: this broadening refers to items documented at the company level.
The project scope was finally defined as follows:
Calculating environmental costs at a company level to include all emission treatment and prevention costs categories, but not includ-ing non-product outputs. Non-product outputs could have been cal-culated only after analysing all processes within the company. This was not possible within the framework of the project, since a cleaner production assessment and input/output analysis was only available for the atrazine synthesis plant.
Table 16. Cost Centres with Environmental Costs/Revenues—HERBOS
10 Sector of Executive Director 11 Services Sector
1110 General Services Dept. with General Manager Office (Ecological Laboratory included) 1111 Safety Department
1112 Fire Safety Department
1120 Department of Mechanical Maintenance 1130 Electrical Department and maintenance 1140 Department of Energy (Incineration plant) 1150 Department of Safety at Work
1160 Department of Transport 1170 Restaurant
12 Sector of Finance 2 Pest Control Programme
21 Pest control preparation and purchasing sector 2220 Atrazine Synthesis Plant
2230 Dusting-powder Plant
23 Sector of Pest Control Production
3 Construction Materials Production Programme (CM) 30 Office of Director (CM)
31 Commercial Sector 32 Controlling Sector (CM) 33 Production Sector (CM)
Code Cost Centres
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Calculating environmental costs for the atrazine plant, including emis-sion treatment and prevention costs, as well as the purchase value and processing costs of non-product outputs. This job relied heavily on the results of the cleaner production assessment previously per-formed within the TEST project.
2. Cleaner Production Assessment
The Cleaner Production Module of the TEST project was based only on one product-atrazine. The calculation of losses is based on the raw mate-rial consumptions that exceed the technological norms. The latter are derived from the technological flowchart. Raw material consumption and final product quantity is determined through measurements wherever pos-sible. Estimates were used where no monitoring of flows is performed. It was estimated that 46,260 m3/year of process water is lost in the atrazine production process.
Direct data are not recorded in the books for the volume of water used in the atrazine production. These costs appear in different positions.
Table 17 shows the breakdown of industrial water costs in 2001.
Table 17. Breakdown of Industrial Water Costs in 2001 (in HRK)—HERBOS
Electric Energy 0.4 kWh 0.40 0.16 On the basis of technical characteristic of pumps
Hypochlorite 0.05 l 2.20 0.11 Consumption norm
Amortisation 0.50 Estimation
Salaries 0.11 Estimation
Other Overhead Costs 0.20 Estimation
Net Price of Water 1.08 Part of the costs of Department
of Energy
Sewage Fee 1.39 For the whole plant
Water Consumption Fee 0.72 For the whole plant
Wastewater Discharge Fee 1.70 For the whole plant
Concession Fee 0.08 For the whole plant
River Basin Water Fee 0.41 For the whole plant
Municipal Fee 0.26 For the whole plant
Fees Total: 4.46
Total: 5.64
Unit Price
Cost Category Amount/m3 HRK HRK/m3 Calculation Method
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Only two of these cost items are directly allocated to the herbicide syn-thesis facility (the surface run-off and the water consumption fees). All other fees are recorded as overheads and are allocated through uniform keys not related to environmental protection.