Today, we have many environmental problems as global warming, depletion of ozone layer, acid rain and so on. In order to solve these problems, we must change our social system from the present high entropy type to low entropy type societies. Then environmental management system is necessary to manage a social system ecologically. Environmental auditing, which constructs, evaluates and improves environmental management system, has attracted increasing attention in the world, especially in the economically developed countries. And fundamentals of environmental auditing are the concepts of "system" and "environment" and the principle of entropy increase. Social system, such as companies and so forth introduce low entropy raw materials and useful energy from environment, make products in the system and send out low entropy products and high entropy wasted materials and useless heat to the environment.
In this study, environmental auditing was carried out in a private company, OSTRAND Co. Ltd., in Tokyo for 2 years in 1993 and 1994. Measured were incoming materials, copy papers and delivery matters in incoming part, one sided papers in the system and informative products, papers to be recycled and papers to be burned in outgoing part. In this one week experiment, incoming materials were 4.9kg, one sided papers produced and used were 6.6 and 12.9kg, respectively, and informative products were 37.7kg.
From the data of this environmental auditing environmental balance accountings and flow charts were made, displayed and discussed as useful and concrete tools to decrease environmental impact. And unit per products was proposed as a method to evaluate environmental impact. Since all social systems exist in order to generate products, unit per products is useful for making comparison among several social systems, and making reduction program of environmental impact. Then five kinds of effects by environmental auditing (reduction of environmental impact, improvement of employee's environmental consciousness, objective check for company's environmental management, merit by opening the information to the public and cost reduction) were examined by comparing the results of 1993 and 1994. For example about cost reduction, it was calculated that in a year 150000～320000yen can be reduced by using one sided papers and 1870000yen can be reduced by making informative products two sided print.
In this study, it's confirmed that environmental auditing is very important tool to solve environmental problems globally and to construct a low entropy type society. Such the detailed data in this study are significant for the progress of environmental auditing.
At present international standardization of environmental auditing has been discussed about only enterprises by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). In the future, we must try to apply environmental auditing to all social systems such as governments, family homes and educational or research institutions.