An exploration of future of bioplastics and their physical, chemical and biological characteristic through bibliometric Analysis

Recently, petroleum-based plastic has become an integral part of human lives; however, its imperishable nature makes it the leading pollutant in solid waste, creating serious environmental problems. Inadequate plastic waste management increases the toxicity of landfills and causes air and marine pollution. Several initiatives have been started to overcome these challenges. Its replacement with biodegradable plastic is one of the upcoming solutions. Thus, many researchers have developed biodegradable plastics from various biomaterials. Despite such potential, no study has reported the research trend for these materials in the literature. This study is carried out to shed light on the past, present, and future research trends in the bioplastic arena. Such a study is important for bioplastic-related research to be made available at a single source with in-depth analysis. A bibliometric analysis is a tool that is carried out for this purpose. Despite numerous research articles and review papers available in the same field, there are limited reported studies related to the bibliometric analysis of bioplastics. Hence, this study has focused on the bibliographic data of 3802 publications from January 1999 till 1st January 2021, extracted from the Web of Science core collection databases using various combinations of search strings. VOSviewer was used to analyze the bibliographic data. With the help of various analysis techniques available with VOSviewer, many types of analysis (e.g. predominantly used material, tested properties of bioplastic etc.) were carried out. Through thisreview, the development and geographical distribution of the research related to bioplasticshave been investigated.