Do you believe that the research papers now can have an impact? Cite examples and do you think that it's possible?
Yes and no, one awareness of research needs to be provided and easily accessible to the common person ignorance is bliss the best research papers can find amazing solutions but no one will implement them if they are not aware there is a better approach of doing things.
Over time yes research papers make an impact especially in economic matters the problem is that the incentive mechanism may not exist for some social good proposals.
Example Fracking grew fast because of the real economic gain of oil production, but solar powered rooftops are not as quickly unless green subsidies come in or new nuclear.
I don't think that making the research paper accessible to people will make an ordinary person knowledgeable already. If it's for the common person, I don't think that everyone would want to understand the scientific papers or something because they might get bored. There are also technical terms that surround a research paper, so it's best that the person has a technical background to make sense to all.
The initial criteria you proposed in the OP though was for people to start in their own little ways improvements to their lifestyle that reduce the amount of pollution and that these micro-adjustments in collective will have a positive impact on our environment.
Then in order for that statement to be true it eventually needs to be applied toward a real world situation from a research field, the question then becomes the time it takes for that implementation to become mainstream and widely used versus whatever is the current solution.
The same applies to industry if a CO2 Scrubber adds costs to the production end then individuals will refuse to add it unless it is mandated by the government to offset emissions.
That is why Carbon Capture was created because industries will always try to reduce costs to the minimum unless they are taxed on the byproduct hence the creation of the Carbon Credit to force companies that were really inefficient to become more efficient in regard to pollution overruns.
(In farming: I don't care that it impacts other people I'll use pesticides to increase my crop yields what happens downstream is not my business)
That said their are always efficiencies to be had that can reduce the environmental impact while still building up economic profits, think smaller microchips (less materials are needed lower electricity requirements more processor power and output which impacts size) vs Vacuum Tubes big giant TV's lot of materials needed hence heavy.
Solutions can come from industry or individuals the impact depends on the knowledge to get the widget to scale.
(Alas redundancies have also decreased due to this consumerist improvement cycle so things break more easy on the inverse scale and quality can drop in order to be cheap) Why new things break a lot more quicker than old things ^^.