Achieving environmental sustainability in manufacture: A 28-year bibliometric cartography of green manufacturing research

Abstract

As one of the most important fields for fulfilling the sustainable development of human beings, green manufacturing has been attracting the attention of academia since the 1990s with the evolution of several synonym concepts. After nearly 30 years’ development, a general cartography of existing research is now needed to reflect the major ideas and questions involved. This is carried out here by a bibliometric analysis. Following a basic review of the evolutionary progress of “green manufacturing” and similar concepts, we collect articles concerning green manufacturing, environmentally conscious/responsible manufacturing, benign manufacturing, and sustainable manufacturing. The data sources are limited to SCI and SSCI journals. Then we extract high frequency keywords from the articles and calculate their co-occurrence. A hierarchical clustering is conducted based on the co-word matrix, and six clusters are identified and visually presented by a strategic diagram and bi-dimensional multi-dimensional scaling diagrams. The six clusters cover the research subjects of green chemical materials, green manufacturing principles and approaches, common analytical tools, green manufacturing implementation of industrial firms, green supply chain, industrial ecology, GHG emissions, and green machining tools and processes. We build a framework to embed the green manufacturing system into the economic-social-eco system and divide green manufacturing research into three levels: application, organization, and system. Based on this framework, we combine the existing research architecture and research boundaries in the field and propose possible future research directions.