Cost Benefit Analyses of Organic Waste Composting Systems through the lens of Time Driven Activity-Based Costing

Abstract

Time Driven ABC (TDABC) which tries to address some of ABC’s shortcomings still remains unexplored in academic research. This paper focuses on the adoption of TDABC to assess the economic viability of two commonly used composting systems for organic wastes in New Zealand. The results support previous studies in terms of what TDABC model can do in practice. As with ABC, TDABC can provide two types of information for decision making: (1) it can determine the costs of objects (but with less accuracy) and (2) and can provide a link between resource pools and cost pools/cost hierarchies. The results further show that differences in mass density and production duration/time are among the main factors influencing the economic superiority of the two composting systems investigated in this study. The results suggest that composting of organic waste is a commercially viable approach for cleaner production of farming and agricultural products. It is also a valuable alternative to landfilling, thus reducing dependence on landfill for the disposal of organic waste.