Progress of hydrogen production from food waste – A systematic, content, and bibliometric review

Food waste (FW) presents difficulties for waste management which is a significant worldwide issue. However, there is a growing energy crisis globally, and there is not enough fossil fuel available to support the growing demand. This can however be overcome using environmentally acceptable and sustainable energy such as biohydrogen. This study thus employed a systematic, content-based, and bibliometric review approach to analyze the literature on hydrogen production from FW resources within the last two decades. The study used the bibliometric analysis tools (i.e., Biblioshiny in R and the VOSviewer) to analyze and visualize a total of 2022 pertinent documents on the subject matter obtained from the Scopus database. According to the analyzed data, biohydrogen, a biofuel produced through biological processes, has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but its widespread adoption requires addressing production rate, yield, and process scaling. China turned out to be the nation with the most papers on the subject, totaling 2610. The USA (829), India (501), Italy (471), South Korea (419), Brazil (374), Japan (285), Germany (257), Spain (256), Canada (187), and the UK (187) were the other top-performing nations. The study ended with future research directions that researchers can work on in the future. The findings of this study could guide future research on the conversion of food waste to hydrogen energy based on the research gaps identified in the study.