Abstract
The world population maintains a growing trend and in turn, the amount of municipal waste is also increasing. Rising municipal waste quantity poses a challenge for human beings and the environment, therefore recycling becomes important for environmental sustainability and circular economy. This study explores the effects of municipal waste recycling and renewable energy on the environment sustainability proxied by CO2 emissions in EU member states over the period from 2004 to 2017 through panel cointegration and causality analyses. Recycling is considered an efficient way to reduce CO2 emission, but surprisingly our results indicate mixed findings. The causality analysis revealed no significant interaction among recycling rate, renewable energy and CO2 emissions. However, in the long run, the negative impact of recycling and renewable energy use on CO2 emissions were revealed but varied among the countries. Results indicate that increasing renewable energy consumption will play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These findings must raise awareness among policymakers that should focus on the adoption and implementation of different types of sustainable energy policies that can affect directly or indirectly renewable energy sector development.
Highlights
Climate change and CO2 reduction as well as environmental pollution and recycling of municipal waste are seen as important and interrelated topics in society as well as in science these days [1].Waste management, waste recovery, reuse and recycling are not new concepts or activities
This research aims to contribute to the relevant literature in two ways: firstly, it is one of the early studies that investigates the impact of municipal waste recycling on CO2 emissions in a sample of EU member states, trying to fill the gap related to our research area
The main focus of the study is to explore the impact of municipal waste recycling together with renewable energy on CO2 emissions regarding the limited literature about our research topic through Westerlund and Edgerton [26] panel cointegration test and Dumitrescu and Hurlin [27] causality test
Summary
Climate change and CO2 reduction as well as environmental pollution and recycling of municipal waste are seen as important and interrelated topics in society as well as in science these days [1].Waste management, waste recovery, reuse and recycling are not new concepts or activities. With climate change being an increasingly discussed topic, there is a move towards reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the European Union, waste management activities are a non-negligible source of greenhouse gases, it is estimated that in 2017 they represented about 3% of the total greenhouse gas emissions [3]. In this context, as part of the Circular Economy Action Plan [4] and the New Circular Economy Action Plan [5], a set of directives addressing waste management were adopted and implemented
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