Use when targeting Resources, Conservation & Recycling or deciding whether a resource-efficiency/circular-economy manuscript fits this venue. Encodes the journal's fit, the materials-and-waste circularity contribution bar, material-flow-analysis expectations, house style, official-submission re-check, and desk-reject heuristics.
Use when targeting Resources, Conservation & Recycling or deciding whether a resource-efficiency/circular-economy manuscript fits this venue. Encodes the journal's fit, the materials-and-waste circularity contribution bar, material-flow-analysis expectations, house style, official-submission re-check, and desk-reject heuristics.
Resources, Conservation & Recycling (RCR) is the Elsevier journal for resource efficiency,
waste management, recycling, and the circular economy of materials — material-flow and
substance-flow analysis, recycling and resource-recovery technologies and systems, and the
conservation and reuse of materials. Its defining expectation is a materials-and-waste
circularity contribution: a study that quantifies, improves, or systematizes how materials
are conserved, recovered, recycled, or kept in productive use. Relative to the Journal of
Cleaner Production's broader cleaner-production/sustainability remit, RCR is anchored in the
physical reality of materials and waste flows. A general sustainability-management essay, or a
recycling case with no quantified material outcome, is a weak fit. This skill is a fit /
venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current author
guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live RCR submission guidance.
When to trigger
The author names Resources, Conservation & Recycling and wants a fit/framing check for a
resource-efficiency or recycling paper.
A material-flow, recycling-technology, or resource-recovery study must be re-framed around a
quantified materials-circularity contribution.
The author is deciding between RCR and the Journal of Cleaner Production, or between RCR and
a process-engineering venue.
The author needs RCR's materials/waste-circularity bar (MFA/SFA, recovery yields) and
desk-reject heuristics.
Scope & topic fit
Material-flow analysis (MFA) and substance-flow analysis (SFA): stocks, flows, losses, and
efficiency at product, sector, urban, national, or global scale.
Recycling and resource-recovery technologies and systems: collection, sorting, processing,
and upgrading of post-consumer and industrial materials, with quantified yields and quality.
Circular-economy strategies for materials: reuse, remanufacturing, urban mining, and
closing material loops, with measured circularity indicators.
Waste management systems and their resource, environmental, and economic performance.
Critical-materials, secondary-resource, and by-product valorization with quantitative
recovery and quality outcomes.
Indicators, accounting frameworks, and data infrastructure for measuring material
circularity and resource efficiency.
Method & evidence bar
The contribution must deliver a quantified materials/waste-circularity result: flows,
recovery rates, recycled-content, losses, or resource-efficiency gains, not qualitative claims.
MFA/SFA studies must state system boundaries, reference year, data sources and quality,
mass-balance closure, and uncertainty in the flows.
Recycling/recovery technology claims require measured yields, product quality, and where
relevant energy and reagent inputs, benchmarked against current practice.
Circularity indicators must be defined and reproducible; avoid ad-hoc metrics without
justification or comparability.
Systems, scenario, and policy analyses need defensible data, baseline comparison, and
sensitivity/uncertainty treatment.
Conclusions about resource savings must follow from the quantified balance, not from
optimistic extrapolation of a lab-scale result.
Structure & house style
Standard research-article format; the journal also publishes reviews and shorter formats —
re-check current article types and length on the live guide.
The introduction must frame the materials/waste-circularity gap and the quantified
contribution, not a generic sustainability motivation.
Methods must make the material accounting reproducible — boundaries, data, mass balance,
and uncertainty for MFA/SFA; experimental detail and yields for recovery technology.
Figures should be flow- and balance-oriented (Sankey diagrams, stock/flow accounts,
recovery-yield comparisons), with full inventories and data in SI.
Graphical abstract and highlights are expected; re-check current specifications on the live guide.
Official-submission checklist
Before giving submission-ready advice, read ../../resources/source-basis.md and
../../resources/official-source-map.md; start from the Elsevier anchors, then cite the
current Resources, Conservation & Recycling page you checked.
Search the live site for "Resources, Conservation and Recycling guide for authors" and follow the current Elsevier version.
Re-check article types, length, abstract, and graphical-abstract/highlights requirements.
