Exploring essential factors to improve waste-to-resource recovery: A roadmap towards sustainability

The increasing amount of waste generation and its adverse environmental effects have become a crucial challenge for the global authorities. Under ecological modernization theory and the circular economy model, resource recovery from waste streams emerges as a practical solution depending on the efficient waste management system. The present research explores potential macroeconomic determinants of waste recovery in the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development countries, covering data from 1995 to 2019. A set of econometric techniques are employed to control the cross-sectional dependence among different variables. Next, the Method of Moments Quantile Regression is applied to analyze the long-term equilibrium relationship of waste recovery with environmental technology, renewable energy consumption, economic growth, globalization, and industrialization. Empirical results reveal the significant influence of targeted variables on waste recovery. Specifically, this study contributes by reporting the positive roles of environmental technology and renewable energy consumption in enhancing waste-to-resource recovery performance. Our findings provide several policy implications for the authorities to promote waste management and recovery towards achieving sustainability . • Environmental technology contributes to waste recovery. • There is heterogeneity in the waste recovery's conditional distribution. • The location-scale effect supports the waste recovery's heterogeneity. • Second generation tests are used to control the cross-sectional dependence. • When compared to other methods, Moments Quantile Regression yields better results.