Environmental footprint in specific industries: intellectual base and research status

Abstract

Environmental footprint (EF) as a critical tool for assessing the environmental impacts of human activities has been widely applied in the sustainable development field. Building upon a review of the current research landscape, this study employs bibliometric analysis to identify the intellectual base of EF research through co-citation networks and to outline research status. Following the release of the European Commission EF framework, the research primarily focused on the development and standardization of the product and organization EF methods, and then expanded to global environmental governance frameworks, such as the circular economy and planetary boundaries, promoting multi-scale environmental impact assessment tools. The enhancement of databases and the increasing emphasis on uncertainty analysis in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Multi-regional Input-output models have enhanced the comparability of assessments. EF research has expanded into sectors such as food systems, healthcare, information and communication technology, pharmaceuticals, batteries, and plastics, offering both theoretical and empirical support for green transitions and environmental performance optimization across sectors. Using metals, healthcare, and construction as cases, this study highlights the shared features and distinct characteristics of EF application across sectors. In the metals sector, research addresses both primary extraction and recycling, with inconsistent treatment of uncertainty. Healthcare studies focus mainly on devices and consumables, with limited attention to hospitals, departments, and treatment pathways. In construction, studies cover materials, structures, firms, and technologies, mostly using LCA, but often lack systematic uncertainty analysis. Future direction could further integrate EF with the planetary boundaries framework and circular economy strategies, improve dynamic modeling in methodological robustness, and broaden application to emerging fields such as hydrogen energy, cryptocurrency mining, cloud computing, and digital infrastructure.

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