The dynamic linkages among environment, sustainable growth, and energy from waste in the circular economy of EU countries

Understanding energy security, climate change, and sustainable development are the critical developmental challenges of EU countries nowadays. Thus, this study aims to assess the linkage of these issues and investigate the role of energy from waste to sustain economic growth and environmental development. 18 European countries are considered and divided into two groups: the high sustainable development and the low sustainable development groups. The Panel Vector-Autoregressive (PVAR) model is employed to achieve our purposed. The results reveal strong evidence for a bidirectional causality between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth in high SDI countries and bidirectional causality waste to energy and economic growth in low SDI countries. Moreover, we find that waste-to-energy is the key factor reducing the emission in the high SDI European countries; however, it contributes a negative effect on the economic development in low SDI European countries (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the The 2nd International Conference on Power Engineering, ICPE, 2021.

Automated summary

Understanding the role of waste-to-energy in sustainable development and economic growth, this study examines its impact on greenhouse gas emissions and economic development in high and low Sustainable Development Index (SDI) European countries.