Industrial Sustainability in Architectural Paints: A Bibliometric Research

Abstract

Sustainability is one of the main challenges of civil construction. Most architectural paints release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that harm the environment and human health. This paper presents the main discussions and theoretical approaches through bibliometrics on the theme of industrial sustainability in architectural paints. The study presents an analysis of citations, the main topics associated with this specific line of research and a conceptual framework, as well as the identification of the most explored approaches in the literature and the main gaps. The Bibliometrix library from the R package was used to organize the published data used and process the generated analyses. The analysis of 773 international scientific documents from January 1985 to November 2019 allowed an overview of the research field related to industrial sustainability in architectural paints. The main findings are summarized as follows: most documents are focused on the study of new paint compositions, observing sustainability criteria in their development; there was little presence of documents dealing with architectural paintings; most publications focus on the development and testing of new paint formulations, which are obtained from the substitution of toxic substances, which indicates that there is also a need to diversify research approaches in this field; few publications were found addressing the subject, which configures a gap in the literature related to this field of research.