A Scientometric Review of Resource Recycling Industry.

Minxi Wang,Xin Li,Ping Liu,Hong Cheng,Zhaoliang Gu

doi:10.3390/ijerph16234654

Abstract

With rapid economic development and urbanization, a large number of primary resources are consumed and accumulate in society as recyclable resource, which causes great pressure on the environment. The development of the resource recycling industry (RRI) can reduce environmental impacts and achieve sustainable development and green growth. Scholars are paying more attention to the resource recycling industry (RRI), and the related literature continues to increase. There are over 7041 publications covering RRI in the Web of Science database from 1996 to 2018. This paper analyzes the time distribution characteristics of the literature and the status of the scientific research cooperation network using the visualization analysis software CiteSpace. The number of documents increased from 94 in 1996 to a peak of 963 in 2018. There is no relatively stable core author group. The number of papers published by “Chinese Acad Sci” ranks first among all research institutions. Document co-citation analysis and burst detection are adopted to assess the status and emerging trends in the RRI research domain. A publication by M.C. Monte on waste management is the most cited paper. Additionally, “green and sustainable and technology” and “science and technology—other topics” are the latest emerging subject categories in RRI research. Furthermore, “e-waste”, “reverse logistics” and “lean manufacturing” are emerging research trends for RRI, and “carbon emissions”, “policy”, “demolition waste”, “supply chain management” and “compressive strength” have become hot topics. These findings may provide inspiration for scholars to search for new research directions and ideas.

Highlights

The term “recyclable resource” in this paper is defined as “various wastes produced in the process of social production and consumption, which have lost all or part of their original use-value, and can be recycled and processed so that they can regain their use-value” [1]
This paper counted the number of documents retrieved using Excel software and created a Betweenness centrality in CiteSpace is a measure of the importance of nodes in the network
Through detailed analysis using CiteSpace, we found a number of keywords with bursts and selected the top 20 keywords for these bursts; see Table 8

Summary

Introduction

The term “recyclable resource” in this paper is defined as “various wastes produced in the process of social production and consumption, which have lost all or part of their original use-value, and can be recycled and processed so that they can regain their use-value” [1]. Recyclable resource includes scrap metals; electronic scrap products; scrap mechanical and electrical equipment and their components; scrap paper raw materials (such as wastepaper, cotton); scrap light chemical raw materials (such as rubber, plastics, pesticide packaging, animal bone and hair) and scrap glass [1]. With rapid economic development and urbanization, large quantities of primary resources are consumed and accumulate in society as recycled resources, which cause great pressure on the environment. The continuous development of human society requires the acquisition of various resources from nature, and the world faces the threat of resource depletion.

Methods

Results

Conclusion