A bibliometric analysis of circular economy concept in E-waste research during the period 2008–2020

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of standard literature publications during 2008–2020 on e-waste linked circular economy concept using bibliometric analysis. It presents key topic of waste to wealth and reduction of an environmental hazard. As applied in e-waste management, the concept of circular economy has received considerable attention among the research community over the past few decades. The Scopus database is utilized to retrieve the peer-reviewed articles from 2008 to 2020. A total of 326 publications were identified to focus on e-waste and circular economy. The parameters examined are document type, year wise and journal wise distribution, top authors, top citation and keywords. After that, VOSviewer software is used to visualize the current trends as well as the recent hotspots. It is observed that the topic of a circular economy is encircled by various issues such as e-waste, reuse, recycle, and sustainability in a density map of frequency of appearance of keywords. A few factors are also identified for improved e-waste management and for achieving the sustainable development goals of 2030 though minimized utilization of natural resources.