Strategic Decision Making in Waste Management from Life Cycle Perspective *

Recently, waste management has attracted extensive interests from researchers, with conflict being a very important topic in this field. However, most research on conflicts in waste management is presented in a scattered manner, making it fail to effectively guide complex waste management practices. To address this issue, in this study, a systematic analysis of 178 literatures and related cases on waste management conflicts published between 1992 and 2023 was conducted from the life cycle perspective, by using VOSviewer software in bibliometric. The analysis focused on examining different types of conflicts in waste management, conflicts at different stages in waste management processes, and methods for resolving conflicts. The results show that: ⅰ) Research on conflicts in waste management has experienced rapid growth since 2014, and relevant research efforts are distributed in different disciplines; ⅱ) More and more researches in the literature focus on optimizing the entire waste management supply chain, rather than the siting of a single facility; and ⅲ) Waste classification has been added between waste generation and waste collection, which improves the whole process of waste management. However, conflicts caused by unclear rights and responsibilities of waste classification have not been well studied, so that there are no solutions to such conflicts.