Secondary Resources in the Bio-Based Economy: A Computer Assisted Survey of Value Pathways in Academic Literature

Research looking at existing and novel value pathways for organic wastes has been steadily increasing in recent years. There have been few considerably broad overview studies of such materials and their valuation potential in... [ view full abstract ]

Research looking at existing and novel value pathways for organic wastes has been steadily increasing in recent years. There have been few considerably broad overview studies of such materials and their valuation potential in the bio-based economy in part because of the vast multitude of materials and processes that can be used to produce energy carriers, chemicals, and materials of varying value.

The aim of this work is to facilitate the identification of valorization options for organic waste streams, which may be re-used in a variety of technologies, applications and products (TAPs). We employ two different techniques to analyse literature at both the macro and the micro level. First, at the macro level, Topic Modeling is used to present an overview of clusters of research around secondary organic resources, processes, and disciplines.  Secondly, at the micro level, Co-occurrence Analysis was used to help to survey the diverse valorization  options for a large array of waste streams.  Co-occurrences were evaluated using the Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) measure to locate terms which co-occur more frequently in literature than would be expected by chance.

The results of both the Topic Modelling and Co-occurrence Analysis are available as online interfaces that allow users to interactively explore the results, and drill down to the underlying literature upon which the results are based.  While we demonstrate a proof-of-concept, this work could be expanded to industrial wastes as well, and it points the way for using Big Data to suggest novel pathways for implementing the Circular Economy and facilitating Industrial Symbiosis.