Akademik Məlumat İdarəetmə Sistemi
International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Considering that preventing waste generation or disposing of waste in a manner that minimizes its negative environmental effects is critical to preserving environmental quality and combating climate change, this study focuses on researching the effect of waste-related patent sub-types on waste-related emissions. In doing this, the study also considers the effect of income and energy utilization sub-types, focuses on China, considers waste-related GHG emissions (WGHG) as the main indicator and waste-related CO2 emissions (WCO2) for robustness, uses data from 1993 to 2021, and applies a kernel-based least squares (KRLS) approach to uncover marginal effects. The results suggest that waste-related patent sub-types are generally inefficient in reducing waste-related emissions, except for some lower percentiles. On the other hand, some of the waste-related patent sub-types (e.g. fuel from waste, mechanical processing of waste, recycling of waste) as well as nuclear and fossil energy have a reducing effect at lower (0.25th) percentiles, whereas they are ineffective across the remaining (0.50th and 0.75th) percentiles. Also, income and renewable energy do not decline waste-related emissions across all percentiles. Moreover, the empirical results are robust based on alternative indicator use. Furthermore, the KRLS approach provides high estimation results of around 99.8%. Overall, the study reveals varying but mostly inefficient effects, except for some lower levels, of waste-related patent sub-types on waste-related emissions and discusses policy recommendations (e.g. relying on nuclear energy and specific patent sub-types) for China.