Ergonomics for environmental sustainability is a relatively young discipline that is gaining in importance. What is the current state of research and what are the central themes in the domain? Prof. Baidyanath Biswas, Trinity Business School, explores these trends and developments through a bibliometric analysis.

Exploring the Discipline of Ergonomics for Environmental Sustainability by Celine Sophie Lüdtke and Tom Gamble. Related research: A retrospective analysis of the evolution of ergonomics for environmental sustainability (2011-2021), Bhawana Rathore, Baidyanath Biswas, Rohit Gupta, and Indranil Biswas

Searching for Gold: A sustainable future through ergonomics?

What is the field of ergonomics for environmental sustainability and why should we care about it? First, we need to focus on the sustainability part of the field. By definition, sustainable development describes development that fulfils both the needs of the present while making sure that future generations retain the ability to grow and fulfil their needs. This requires a balancing act between economic, social, and natural capital, a concept called the “Triple Bottom Line” (TBL) approach. For example, poverty is a driver that intensifies the environment’s negative impact, leading to people over-exploiting available resources. In this instance, the TBL approach suggests uplifting economic and social capital to diminish environmental impact.

By extension, this approach requires sustainable development and the human factor to focus on the human elements within a larger system, i.e. the social capital. Building sustainable work systems in this relationship between sustainable development and human factors is key to satisfying physical, physiological and psychological human needs.

It is here that the field of ergonomics becomes relevant. Ergonomics is essentially the study of how to fit a task to enhance workplace productivity, efficiency and effectiveness, initially emphasising only human efficiency and productivity issues. Ergonomics for environmental sustainability adds a second layer to this approach, researching ergonomics interventions that focus on nature and the human affinity with the natural world.

As such, integrating the discipline of ergonomics with environmental sustainability provides invaluable insights into how ergonomics can contribute to protecting and securing our environmental impact. The goals of ergonomics and environmental sustainability begin to overlap, focusing on effectiveness, efficiency, health and safety, and usability on the one hand and conservation, preservation and recycling on the other hand. Moreover, research in the field of ergonomics for environmental sustainability focuses on answering two central questions: How humans and industrial manufacturing can accelerate natural capital conservation, preservation and restoration and secondly, how humans can connect with nature in a way that facilitates human well-being and effectiveness.

So, while researchers in this field do not exactly hunt for treasure, they provide invaluable insights into the role of human-environment relationships in achieving sustainability goals. In this light, they apply ergonomics and human factors to the design of products, work environments, jobs, and systems to reduce negative impacts on nature, developing human systems that fully and sustainably integrate with their natural environments.

Treasure Hunting with Bibliometric Analysis

Prof. Biswas et al.’s study conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis – that is, a quantitative study of scientific output and the networks behind it – of 418 research papers that examines the impact of ergonomics on sustainability. Moreover, bibliometric analysis systematically reviews and extracts scholarly articles based on keywords, authors, paper titles, and affiliations to identify research gaps for a specific domain, both geographically and content-wise.

The study found that interest in ergonomics for environmental sustainability has significantly increased in recent years, with publications growing at an annual rate of 4.9%, peaking in 2021. On average, each publication received 15.72 citations, or 2.32 citations per year.

The research identified the South African scholar Andrew Thatcher as the most productive author, with 9 articles and 240 citations. This establishes him as a key figure in the discipline, having played a crucial role in shaping the scope of the field from both academic and industrial perspectives. His research covers key themes such as occupational health and safety, workplace layout, sustainable behaviour, and green building design. Another influential author is Neville A. Stanton, with 313 citations for his publications and, overall, the researchers identified collaboration networks office author-based clusters, with central figures being Andrew Thatcher at Witwatersrand University, Fabio Sgarbossa at NTNU, and Laerte Sznelwar of Sao Paulo University.

In terms of journals, the top 10 journals (out of 29) published 41.4% of all articles, with the top three being “Applied Ergonomics,” “Ergonomics,” and “International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics.” Similarly, the leading countries regarding the number of published articles in the field were the US, Italy, the UK, Brazil, and China. This geographical distribution indicates that research on ergonomics for environmental sustainability has garnered global attention.

The interest in the US can be traced to its position as one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Consequently, there is a heightened concern for environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, pollution, and waste, which has led to the proposal of numerous environmental policies.

However, it also highlights that only a limited number of articles have been published in Asia and Africa, although there is an exception in the case of Prof. Andrew Thatcher from South Africa. The research further identified strong collaborative ties between the US and the UK, as well as between the UK and Australia. Additional collaborative networks are centred around Italy and Spain.

The three institutes with the most collaborations were the University of the Witwatersrand, Universiti Teknologi Mara, Malaysia and Purdue University, USA, whereby the former’s publication can mainly be traced back to the efforts of Professor Andrew Thatcher. His university collaborated closely with Monash University Malaysia. Equally, the University of Southampton also worked closely with Monash University.

A keyword analysis identified the top 10 author keywords: human factors, ergonomics, sustainability, sustainable development, environmental ergonomics, environmental design, green ergonomics, musculoskeletal disorders, environmental factors and office ergonomics. With the top paper title keywords being actors, human, ergonomics, design, sustainable, study, analysis, health, safety, and environmental.

There seems to be a significant difference between the local and global citation counts. This suggests that researchers in other disciplines have yet to recognise this field, and, as a whole, it remains in its infancy. This is further supported by the fact that these highly cited publications were published only in the last 6 to 7 years.

X Marks the Spot: Identifying central themes in the discipline

In the second step, the researchers aimed to identify networks in the ergonomics for environmental sustainability discipline and they ended up finding two themes.

The first of these treats sustainability as a new approach to human factors that influences ergonomics for environmental sustainability. It includes climatic changes and other issues related to ergonomics and reviews articles that explore these challenges and opportunities and evolve towards a sustainable world through human factors and ergonomics. The second theme deals with the challenges of transferring sustainable development to organisational and work systems. It identifies the scope of ergonomics from organisational strategies as well as topics like consumption and production, transportation and waste recycling. 

Overall, the researchers identified primary themes as “human factors and sustainability”, “ergonomics and environment”, and “green ergonomics and sustainable development”. Recent trends in the research domain centred around the keywords sustainability, social sustainability, musculoskeletal disorders, and occupational health and safety.

Future Research Opportunities

The researchers’ findings show that there are many opportunities for future research in the field of ergonomics for environmental sustainability.

Two major research questions derived from their analysis examine the dimensions of “ergonomics for environmental sustainability” that would benefit African and Asian countries, as well as how the COVID-19 pandemic affects the field globally. However, Prof. Baidyanath Biswas and his colleagues suggest additional research areas to explore, highlighting the opportunities within this domain:

DESIGN: The researchers identified a lack of qualitative studies and a cohesive ergonomics framework. Research opportunities may exist in reducing the weight of containers used in the recycling industry, biomimetic design, waste management improvements, error prevention, reducing fuel wastage through task analysis, and workstation design for green buildings to decrease musculoskeletal injuries.

GREEN JOB: They suggest that ergonomics should be an integral part of job design in the recycling and renewable sectors, providing a thorough understanding of the necessary behaviour changes required for a sustainable society. Furthermore, they emphasise the need for an awareness plan and implementation framework to reduce musculoskeletal injuries in manual jobs within renewable industries.

GREEN ORGANISATION: Here, the researchers propose examining how time spent in nature impacts employee well-being and integrating ergonomics within the global supply chain to make sustainability a core component of these supply chains.

THEORIES: Moreover, existing theories could be deepened. Future researchers could also borrow applicable theories from other fields of knowledge, use multiple theoretical lenses and develop new theories.

FOCUS OF PUBLICATIONS IN JOURNALS: Although the ergonomics of environmental sustainability research is a niche discipline, it could be disseminated among a wider community of scholars and published in a greater variety of journals (e.g., supply chains, general business and management, systems design and information systems, etc.).

APPLICATION AND PRACTICE-ORIENTATION: As the scholars only identified a few empirical articles and case studies, they propose that future researchers build more datasets and conduct survey and questionnaire-based studies.

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• Read a related article: How to reduce the environmental impact of sport?
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