A Bibliometric Review of Research Progress on Carbon Emissions in Recycled Concrete

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a systematic mapping of research on recycled concrete carbon emissions, helping identify key literature, hotspots, and future directions.

🏢実務担当者:Construction firms can benchmark their life-cycle carbon accounting practices against the trends identified in this review.

🏛政策担当者:Offers insights for developing standardized carbon accounting rules for recycled construction materials, relevant to green building regulations.

Against the backdrop of China’s “Dual Carbon” strategy—the national strategic goal of achieving carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060—and the accelerated improvement of the solid waste governance system specified in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the low-carbon recycling of construction waste has become a core research topic for the sustainable development of the construction industry. To systematically reveal the evolutionary laws, research hotspots and frontier trends regarding the life-cycle carbon emissions of recycled concrete (this study defines its accounting scope clearly for the first time, covering three parts: ① direct carbon emissions generated in the stages of recycled aggregate recovery, processing, transportation and concrete mixing; ② indirect carbon emissions reduced by replacing the exploitation of natural aggregates with recycled aggregates; ③ potential carbon sequestration benefits brought by carbonation curing during the service phase of recycled concrete), the literature published from 2015 to 2025 retrieved from the CNKI and Web of Science Core Collection databases was selected as the research sample. Standardized data preprocessing was carried out: intra-database duplicate literatures were removed based on titles, authors and publication years, cross-database duplicate records were manually eliminated, and non-academic documents including news, editorial notes and conference abstracts were screened out. A total of 1340 valid publications were finally obtained to form the analysis dataset. Bibliometric tools CiteSpace and VOSviewer were adopted to quantitatively analyze the annual publication trends, national and institutional distribution, keyword co-occurrence clustering and temporal evolution characteristics in this research field. The results show that the annual publication volume concerning the life-cycle carbon emissions of recycled concrete presents a continuous upward trend, and the research development can be divided into three stages: initial exploration, rapid expansion and steady growth. China, the United States and Australia act as the core research forces in this field. Current research hotspots mainly focus on recycled aggregate modification, life-cycle assessment, carbon emission accounting, durability performance optimization and low-carbon preparation technologies, while research frontiers are gradually shifting toward multi-source data fusion, machine learning-based carbon emission prediction and low-carbon path optimization. Based on the quantitative bibliometric results, this study puts forward targeted priorities for future research: establishing a unified localized specification system for life-cycle carbon accounting, developing data-driven optimization models for the low-carbon mix proportion design of recycled concrete, and promoting the large-scale engineering demonstration and application of high-value resource utilization technologies, to facilitate the full life-cycle low-carbon transformation of construction waste recycling.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16142710first seen 2026-07-10 05:30:45