Sorting Through Waste Management Literature: A Text Mining Approach to a Literature Review

With sustainability and management of waste as focus of multiple disciplines, there is still a considerable gap in the academic literature in regard to the definition of “waste management”. The present research addresses the issue of a substantial lack of an acceptable interdisciplinary definition of waste management by means of synthesizing existing literature on the matter and identifying the most recurrent and relevant waste management concepts by applying the method of text mining. The results allow gaining a deeper understanding of (1) the typical concepts of each scientific discipline that studies waste management, (2) cross-disciplinary concept differences and similarities, and (3) the concept networks that can become potential building blocks of the waste management studies definition. Finally, a number of future research directions and propositions are suggested.