Air pollution, water pollution, and robots: Is technology the panacea.

The degradation of the ecological environment caused by industrialization presents a major challenge for policymakers as they aim to develop sustainability. Is there a way to balance industrial growth and environmental sustainability? To answer this pressing question, we constructed a micro-level longitudinal dataset containing 41,419 firms with 148,877 observations during 2000-2013 to develop a fine-grained understanding of the environmental implications as firms closely follow the recent technology trend in automation and intelligence. Our findings strongly support business environmental management strategies of using autonomous and intelligent technologies as a response to more rigorous environmental regulations, while caution has to be made on the notion that "technology is everything." The increasing level of robot adoption contributes to pollution abatement in an intensive form mediated by productivity change, change-in-process, and end-of-pipe interventions. A further decomposition of the productivity effect implies that the drop in the emission intensity of the exhaust gas is due to the rise in total outputs and the decline in air pollution level. In contrast, the drop in the emission intensity for exhaust water is because of the rise of total outputs exceeding the rise of water pollution level. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analyses provide rich implications to guide environmental management practices.

Testing for quadratic impact of industrial robots on environmental performance and reaction to green technology and environmental cost.

Industrial robots play a crucial role in enhancing productivity but their impact on the environment has produced debates. Some researchers have focused on the relation between industrial robots and energy efficiency (or environmental performance), such as Huang et al. (Energy Econ 107:105837, 2022) and Luan et al. (Sustain Prod Consum 30:870-888, 2022). However, their arguments mainly depend on the assumption of linear relationship between the two. This study infers that there is a nonlinear relationship between them from the theories of energy-saving effect, rebound effect, and scale effect. Our research, using data from 74 countries and regions worldwide between 1997 and 2020, reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between the use of robots and their environmental impact. This means that the environment benefits from robot use up to a certain point, beyond which it starts to incur damage. Two moderating factors, green technology and environmental cost, are analyzed and tested. Our findings suggest that the high-green-tech left shifts and steepens the inverted U-shaped relationship whereas the high cost right shifts and flattens the relationship. This study explains the influencing mechanism of industrial robots on environmental performance by integrating the energy-saving effect, the rebound effect, and the scale effect. Our findings enrich the understanding of the robot-environment nexus and emphasize the importance of government in balancing robot use and environmental protection.