Abstract
Composting is a biological process that converts organic waste into compost, an organic fertiliser. As a waste management technology, the use of composting in managing food waste is gaining more attention these days. In recent years, many studies have been done to analyse the research trend in solid waste management using bibliometric analysis, which showed the potential to analyse food waste composting trends using this tool. Bibliometric analysis is used in this study to map and visualise the food waste composting research trend indexed in the SCOPUS database between 1987 and 2021. One thousand seven research papers were exported from the SCOPUS database during the study period, VOSviewer and Microsoft Excel were used to analyse the exported data. The results show that there were 1,007 publications with 31,335 citations. An increasing trend in publication numbers was observed, especially in the recent 15 y. China, US and India are the top 3 contributed countries in this research subject over the 34 y research period, with the US being the top contributed country before 2000. In recent years, China has become the major contributor to food waste composting research. Keywords analysis was done using VOSviewer, and “soil” was found to be strongly linked to the food waste composting research, followed by “emission” and “organic matter”. The appearance of strongly linked keywords such as “emission” and “landfill” reveals the potential environmental issues that are the major criteria to be of concern when working on food waste composting. The presence of keywords such as “soil”, “plant”, “application”, and “organic matter” indicates the potential of compost usage as soil amendments. An upward trend in the publication numbers is likely to continue in the next decade. Further study on environmental issues and compost quality might contribute to the safety and efficient use of compost in a soil application.
