Pollution reduction effect of the digital transformation of heavy metal enterprises under the agglomeration effect

Abstract

There are few studies on the reduction of heavy metal pollution from the perspectives of digital transformation and the agglomeration effect of heavy metal enterprises. In this study, 430 heavy metal enterprises in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River were selected as research samples based on the data learning method. The content analysis method based on data mining was used to measure the degree of digital transformation of heavy metal enterprises, and spatial dynamic analysis methods such as kernel density analysis and inverse distance weight were used to build an integrated framework of quantitative analysis based on linear regression and qualitative analysis based on visualization. First, the pollution emission behavior, industrial agglomeration degree and enterprise pollution reduction performance of heavy metal enterprises in the urban agglomeration of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River were visualized by GIS. Then, the systematic GMM method was used to analyze the pollution reduction performance of enterprises in digital transformation, as well as the interaction effect and threshold characteristics under the effect of enterprise agglomeration. The results were as follows. (1) The average concentrations of Cd, Pb and Cr in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River in 2020 were 1.111 μg/L, 1.145 μg/L and 1.163 μg/L, respectively, which were lower than the standards of heavy metal pollution. (2) The geographical coupling degrees of digital transformation and pollution reduction of heavy metal enterprises in the urban agglomeration of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River is high, and the coupling degree of high value areas of digital transformation degree and high value areas of emission reduction degree is as high as 84.3%. (3) Under the agglomeration effect, there is a U-shaped curve between the digital transformation of enterprises and pollution reduction performance. When the agglomeration degree of enterprises is above the threshold of 2.303, the digital transformation of enterprises has a significant positive impact on pollution reduction.