Track: Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract

Sustainability has now linked as the foundation of any development. Economical sustainability has been a thrust for corporates since long but Environmental Sustainability was mostly neglected up to 20^th century whereas Social Sustainability is still categories as less explored dimension. The objective of this paper is to understand the growing importance and evolution of social and environmental dimensions of sustainability in literature specifically related to leather sector. A bibliometric analysis was carried out to achieve the above objective. Scopus database was searched by using a large number of keywords in the title and abstract fields. The resulted 542 articles were scanned and after removing the duplicity, articles in languages other than English and those got published after the year 2000, 349 articles were finally selected. A descriptive analysis of these articles were conducted, based on the significant contributions of influential authors, organizations, countries, publication sources, titles and keywords etc., using the different open softwares like Mendeley, VOS-viewer etc. Our findings shows that in the leather sector, and in our selected dimensions of sustainability, researchers’ interest grew after 2012 before which the publications in these areas remained only in single digit per year. India is the most contributing country in leather sector, followed by the United State of America and Italy. Another interesting observation was that around 10% of these documents were published in the Proceedings of 34^th IULTCS Congress held at Chennai, India in the year 2017 with a theme “science and technology for sustainability of leather”. Journal of Cleaner Production is the second most contributing resource followed by the Journal of the American leather chemists association, and together these 3 resources contributed more than 20% of the selected documents. Also social dimension of sustainability was probably neglected by researchers in leather sector as only in 6 documents keyword “social aspects” appeared and only in one article “social sustainability” keyword was stated. Our researched have certain limitations, as we restricted our searched to SCOPUS data base only and future researchers may explore other databases too. This study will contribute in understanding the growing role of social and environmental dimensions of sustainability for the policy makers/managers/researchers in the leather sector.