Abstract
Solid waste generation has been significantly accelerated by the rapid growth of economy and population worldwide. The traditional waste management focusing on waste utilization and disposal is unable to unravel the continuous depletion of finite natural resources. “Zero waste” as an integrated waste management method to promote waste reduction through a pack of strategies such as cleaner production and green consumption has emerged. Here, we systematically reviewed the researches on zero waste from a scientometric perspective, and visually unveiled the most productive countries, evolution process, main authors, major research areas, and documents of zero waste research domain. The results show that with increased publications, zero waste has become a multidisciplinary study area and food waste reduction is the biggest sub-network in zero waste research. The current research frontiers are mainly regarding “lean production,” “consumer behavior,” “productivity.” Accordingly, this study proposed a pathway for realizing zero waste cities with three lanes: (1) research and development, (2) management method, and (3) policy and implementation. The findings are also expected to be beneficial to latecomer researches in the waste management field.
Highlights
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A comprehensive scientometric analysis and visualization on zero waste were innovatively studied.
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The development vein of the zero waste was summarized; the characteristics and trends were analyzed.
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Three research areas—“lean production,” “consumer behavior,” and “productivity”—are the current research frontiers.
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Food waste reduction is the biggest sub-network, representing the highest research attention.
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A holistic strategy for realizing the construction of zero waste cities is proposed.
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Data Availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
Abbreviations
- ZW:
-
Zero waste
- MSW:
-
Municipal solid waste
- ISLR:
-
Integrated systematic literature review
- R&D:
-
Research and development
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Funding
This research is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC1908504), the major project of “The Beijing Social Science Fund” (17ZDA27), and the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (2016THZWYX12).
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Shang Zhang: writing—original draft; conceptualization; methodology; visualization; Quanyin Tan: conceptualization; supervision; Guochang Xu: investigation; writing—review and editing; Jinhui Li: data curation; resources; supervision; project administration; funding acquisition.
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Zhang, S., Tan, Q., Xu, G. et al. Unveiling characteristics and trend of zero waste research: a scientometric perspective. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 44391–44403 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18048-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-18048-3