Ranjbari Meisam, Shams Esfandabadi Zahra, Gautam Sneha, Ferraris Alberto, Scagnelli Simone Domenico
Department of Economics and Statistics "Cognetti de Martiis", University of Turin, Torino, Italy.
ESSCA School of Management, Lyon, France.
Gondwana Res. 2023 Feb;114:124-137. doi: 10.1016/j.gr.2021.12.015. Epub 2022 Feb 5.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the demand for personal protective equipment, in particular face masks, thus leading to a huge amount of healthcare waste generated worldwide. Consequently, such an unprecedented amount of newly emerged waste has posed significant challenges to practitioners, policy-makers, and municipal authorities involved in waste management (WM) systems. This research aims at mapping the COVID-19-related scientific production to date in the field of WM. In this vein, the performance indicators of the target literature were analyzed and discussed through conducting a bibliometric analysis. The conceptual structure of COVID-19-related WM research, including seven main research themes, were uncovered and visualized through a text mining analysis as follows: (1) household and food waste, (2) personnel safety and training for waste handling, (3) sustainability and circular economy, (4) personal protective equipment and plastic waste, (5) healthcare waste management practices, (6) wastewater management, and (7) COVID-19 transmission through infectious waste. Finally, a research agenda for WM practices and activities in the post-COVID-19 era was proposed, focusing on the following three identified research gaps: (i) developing a systemic framework to properly manage the pandemic crisis implications for WM practices as a whole, following a systems thinking approach, (ii) building a circular economy model encompassing all activities from the design stage to the implementation stage, and (iii) proposing incentives to effectively involve informal sectors and local capacity in decentralizing municipal waste management, with a specific focus on developing and less-developed countries.
新冠疫情的爆发显著增加了对个人防护装备的需求，尤其是口罩，从而导致全球产生了大量医疗废物。因此，如此前所未有的大量新产生的废物给参与废物管理（WM）系统的从业者、政策制定者和市政当局带来了重大挑战。本研究旨在梳理迄今为止在废物管理领域与新冠疫情相关的科研成果。为此，通过进行文献计量分析，对目标文献的绩效指标进行了分析和讨论。通过文本挖掘分析，揭示并可视化了与新冠疫情相关的废物管理研究的概念结构，包括七个主要研究主题：（1）家庭和食物垃圾；（2）废物处理人员安全与培训；（3）可持续性与循环经济；（4）个人防护装备与塑料垃圾；（5）医疗废物管理实践；（6）废水管理；（7）新冠病毒通过传染性废物传播。最后，提出了新冠疫情后时代废物管理实践与活动的研究议程，重点关注以下三个已确定的研究空白：（i）遵循系统思维方法，制定一个系统框架，以妥善管理疫情危机对整个废物管理实践的影响；（ii）构建一个涵盖从设计阶段到实施阶段所有活动的循环经济模式；（iii）提出激励措施，以有效吸引非正规部门和地方能力参与市政废物管理的分散化，特别关注发展中国家和欠发达国家。
