Sustainable Fertilizers: Current Publication Landscape and Challenges

Abstract

The ability of modern agriculture to meet future food demand imposed by accelerating growth of the world’s population is a major challenge, and fertilizers play a key role by replacing nutrients in agricultural soil. Given the need for fertilizer, its costs in nonrenewable resources and energy, and the consequences of the CO2 emissions required to make it, people have begun to explore ways to make fertilizer manufacture and use more sustainable. Using data from the CAS Content Collection™, this review examines and analyzes the academic and patent literature on sustainable fertilizers from 2001-2021. The breakdown of journal and patent literature publication over time on this topic, country or region of publications, the substances included in published research, among other things, allows us to understand the general progress in the field, as well as the classes of materials and concepts driving innovation. We hope that this bibliometric analysis and literary review will assist researchers in relevant industries to discover and implement ways to supplement conventional fertilizers and nutrient sources while improving the efficiency and sustainability of waste management and ammonia production.