Mapping the landscape of waste management research: a prisma-guided systematic review

Abstract

Efficient waste management is an important part of sustainable development and one out of three pillars of the circular economy (besides sustainable production and consumption, and raw materials policy). This paper uses the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) methodology to identify and analyze key trends, approaches and research directions in waste management, offering a comprehensive view of the issue through the lens of academic literature. The literature search was conducted in the Web of Science database, and 37 studies meeting the specified criteria were selected. The VOSviewer tool was used to visualize citation links, key terms and subject headings. The analysis showed that the dominant themes in the current literature are planned behavior, waste management, barriers – attitudes – determinants – perceptions, food waste, consumption and circular economy. Linkages between topics in order to outline key hypothetical relationships between and across domains and variables are discussed in the paper.