How can there be an economic transition to a green ecosystem by adapting plastic-to-fuel technologies through renewable energy?

Abstract

Plastics partially help define the way humanity lives today and plastic waste is an increasing phenomenon. It seems to be a serious concern that causes economic inefficiencies and environmental degradation that result in high CO2 emissions rates. To overcome this issue, regulations and policies on the production and behavior of plastics and energy should be reconsidered in the growing world economy. To this end, this study aims to foster economic pathways for decision-makers and answers the question of “How can there be an economic transition to a green eco-system by adapting plastic-to-fuel technologies through renewable energy?”. This strategy is introduced by an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) time-series methodology with the worldwide data from 1950 to 2022, considering energy production, economic growth, and CO2 emissions as independent variables; and plastic production as a dependent variable. The findings reveal the existence of a long-run cointegration relationship. An increase in renewable energy production (REP) and CO2 emissions causes a decrease in plastic production, while the opposite is valid for non-renewable energy production (NREP). The relationships between environmental degradation, energy production and economic growth are conducted through a global perspective. Therefore, this pioneering aspect of the article is expected to become a reference study for many studies in the future, in mitigating global warming by adapting plastic-to-fuel technologies. The paper shows how the production and use of renewable energy have critical importance in terms of the economic development levels of countries and therefore, can benefit countries (i.e., particularly developing and least developed countries) for environmentally friendly production and consumption patterns through a very important good: plastic.