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This paper focuses on the integration of Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Carbon Footprint (CFP), a Carbon Management Accounting (CMA) method that can incentivize firms to reduce carbon. A literature review was conducted to identify the decision-making situations and limitations that MFCA and LCA (CFP) integration models can support. Twenty-one previous literatures were collected and three types of MFCA and LCA (CFP) integration methods were identified: collaborative, product-based partial integration, and process-based partial integration. Next, the collected prior literature was analyzed based on the CMA decision-making framework proposed and some issues were identified. The common challenge of the three existing integrated models is that they can only provide short-term and past-oriented information. It is difficult to provide incentives for carbon reduction because it does not show the relationship between the physical information of carbon emissions and the cost information. It is also difficult to encourage management to make long-term decisions on green procurement, capital investment, environmentally conscious product design, etc. Another common issue is that the use of MFCA tends to focus on the carbon emissions of material losses rather than all the carbon emissions carried by materials, which may impede product development and capital investment with zero or low carbon emissions in mind. This may inhibit product development and capital investment in consideration of zero carbon and low carbon emissions. The quality of LCA (CFP) information to support internal corporate decision-making is still lower than that of MFCA. Finally, another issue is how to share the information from MFCA among supply chains to extend the process-based partially integrated model to the supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A typical palm oil mill is estimated to produce greenhouse gas emissions of 637-1,131 kg CO2 eq/t crude palm oil. Huge efforts are being made to reduce the carbon footprint of palm oil mills. However, the data from such research works have not been consolidated. This paper is a critical review of the most recent developments in the palm oil milling process and unit operations that leads to greenhouse gas emissions, specifically focusing on the development of palm oil mills today. In addition, the paper explored the importance of energy self-sufficiency of palm oil mills. To do so, the author compared this configuration with a mill that requires an external power supply and estimated that a self-sufficient palm oil mill could potentially reduce emissions by 457 kg CO2 eq/t crude palm oil. Methods with the greatest positive effect on the carbon footprint have been identified for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the concept of carbon asset is still new to most power enterprises, they generally lack the knowledge and experience of carbon asset management, to help them cope with the related works, this paper proposes a carbon footprint tracking and quantitative analysis model for power enterprises based on thermodynamics. At first, by employing thermodynamic theories, this paper established an inventory model through the measurement and calculation of carbon concentration and carbon emissions, which can fix defective items, improve inventory efficiency, and save inventory cost. Then, the paper used thermo-economics and the TOPSIS method to construct a carbon inventory index system containing indexes such as carbon exergy ratio and regulation interval, which can reduce the error of carbon emission intensity and update the carbon account information in a timely manner. After that, the carbon footprint was calculated by coupling the carbon thermal map with the multi-dimensional evaluation mechanism, thereby achieving accurate control of carbon emissions and realizing the energy-saving and emissionreduction goals. At last, the attained experimental results showed that, the proposed carbon inventory measurement model established based on thermodynamics can effectively regulate the emission behavior of power enterprises, help achieve the ultimate purposes of reducing cost, increasing efficiency, and optimizing environment. The work done in this paper could provide theoretical support for making decisions for the smooth development of carbon rights market in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]