**1. Introduction**

The reduction and recycling of construction and demolition (C&D) waste is crucial to human society and has a significant impact on sustainable development. Although C&D waste and sustainable development of the ecological environment were initially only the concern of local governments, they will eventually pose a threat to regional and global development [1]. With the rapid urbanization of the world, in order to resolve the serious conflict between increasing C&D waste and environmental protection, it is necessary to explore economically attractive sustainable solutions for the reduction and recycling of C&D waste [2]. The world is currently undergoing profound changes that have not occurred in a century; it is urgent to solve the problem of the large amount of waste produced by human construction activities and to develop research on the sustainability of resources.

C&D waste usually refers to construction waste, decoration waste and demolition waste generated during the construction, renovation and demolition phases of a project [3]. It is mainly composed of large amounts of inert materials (bricks, concrete, etc.), timber, asphalt, metals and plastic [4]. Economic, social, health and technical factors jointly affect the development direction of C&D waste research, and its key areas mainly include

**Citation:** Wang, L.; Lv, Y.; Huang, S.; Liu, Y.; Li, X. The Evolution of Research on C&D Waste and Sustainable Development of Resources: A Bibliometric Study. *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 9141. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su15129141

Academic Editors: Carlos Morón Fernández, Daniel Ferrández Vega and Andres Seco Meneses

Received: 8 January 2023 Revised: 4 March 2023 Accepted: 29 May 2023 Published: 6 June 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

<sup>1</sup> School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Xihua University, Chengdu 610039, China

recycling [5–8], reduction [9,10], environmental impact [11–13], and reduction of the environmental footprint of C&D waste [14,15].

Existing research results have shown that the process of recycling construction waste will be accelerated in some developing countries, while the trend of recycling construction waste in developed countries will gradually change [16]. Recently, the investigation of greenhouse emissions [17–19], carbon footprint [20,21], human factors [22,23] and waste treatment policies [24–26] in the research on recycling construction waste have developed rapidly. It is worth noting that human factors are more likely to appear in research related to construction waste, indicating that it is one of the important factors for the effective management of C&D waste. Li et al. further quantitatively studied the impact of construction waste reduction behavior based on the theory of planned behavior [27]. According to Udawtt, there were both technical and man-made obstacles to waste management in Australian construction projects, but the latter were more dominant [28]. Studies have shown that the development and progress of construction waste management is driven by social motivation and policies [25]. Therefore, the updating of laws and regulations on the treatment of construction waste can also reflect the change in research works on construction waste. Reducing construction waste has always been a hot topic in academia. Some scholars have explored effective methods from the perspectives of construction technology [29] and management methods [30]. With the increase in environmental damage, more and more research has been conducted on the environmental benefits of reduction management [31]. Recently, some scholars have studied the dynamic trend of construction waste by using visual analysis software [32]. The results show that extensive research has been conducted on construction waste reduction, system dynamics analysis and life cycle assessment over the past decade, while the circular economy, big data, building information modeling (BIM), environmental impact (carbon footprint), prefabricated buildings, human factors and logistics planning of construction waste transportation have been vigorously developed from 2019 to 2021. It can be seen that the effective management of C&D waste is related to the sustainability of resources, and then affects the ecological environment and economic development of the whole society [33,34]. Treatment methods are gradually developing towards the direction of resource sustainability, which mainly refers to developing the means of recycling and the reduction of construction waste to monitor and reduce harmful impacts on resources, including the comprehensive application of BIM technology [35–37], 3D printing technology [38,39] and other information technologies, as well as the circular economy and other management methods at various stages of the construction waste life cycle [40].

Since C&D waste has increased steeply and attracted the attention of the industry, many scholars have conducted hot spots and trends research on C&D waste or the sustainable development of resources. However, resource sustainability is closely linked to the development and progress of C&D waste management. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the discussion of the overall hotspots and trends in C&D waste and the sustainable development of resources. Therefore, this paper adopts a more reliable bibliometric analysis method to analyze 3550 publications collected from the Web of Science core collection, including annual quantitative distribution, author cooperation, influential and productive countries/regions and institutions, keyword co-occurrence analysis, literature co-citation analysis and identification of research frontiers, so as to further discover emerging technologies and theories for efficient resource utilization, improve the quality of engineering projects and reduce costs, and promote a virtuous cycle of resources in the construction industry. In the second section, the determination process of the research methods and data collection are expounded. The third section presents the analysis results, and accordingly, the results are further discussed in the fourth section. The research conclusions on C&D waste and the sustainable development of resources are shown in the fifth section.

#### **2. Methods**

#### *2.1. Research Method*

Knowing the hotspots, frontiers and status of a field can guide further research, and bibliometrics can achieve this [41]. Manual literature analysis [42] and scientometric analysis [43] are two methods commonly used in bibliometrics. In order to make the research results more accurate, scientometric analysis, which can visually present the quantitative analysis results, is adopted in this paper [44]. Citespace software developed by Professor Chen Chaomei [45], and VOSviewer, a scientific knowledge mapping software developed by professors Van Eck and Waltman [46] of Leiden University in the Netherlands, are both effective tools for visualization analysis. Many researchers have used Citespace and VOSviewer to research related fields. For example, Zheng et al. summarized the intellectual structure and evolution model of partnership research in the construction industry using Citespace [47]. Chellappa et al. analyzed the status of research on the safety of Indian construction workers through VOSviewer [48]. Therefore, Citespace and VOSviewer are selected in this paper to conduct author cooperation analysis, analysis of countries/territories and institutions, keyword co-occurrence and cluster analysis on the selected literature, in order to study the research status in the field of C&D waste and sustainable development.
