<jats:p> With the continuous advancement of urbanisation, a large amount of construction and demolition waste (CDW) is generated in large-scale construction activities, which has aggravated the problems of environmental pollution, resource waste and ecological damage. The recycling of CDW can effectively solve such problems, and research on this topic has important practical significance. This paper selects 1090 articles on CDW recycling included in the core database of Web of Science from 2000 to 2021 as samples and uses two sorts of bibliometric analysis software, VOSviewer and CiteSpace, to obtain the annual publication volume, country, journal, author, institution, keywords and co-citation visualisation atlas, analysing the hotspots and development trends of CDW recycling research from the two dimensions of time and space. The analysis results show that in China, compared with developed countries, the research on CDW recycling and utilisation started late, and the phenomenon of focusing on construction and ignoring environmental protection is obvious. At present, the relevant research mainly focuses on three aspects: the performance of recycled aggregates, the management of CDW recycling and the strategy for improving CDW recycling. The bibliometric analysis results help scholars in this field to clarify quickly the development trend of CDW recycling, provide research directions for China’s CDW recycling and point out research hotspots, aiming to improve China’s CDW recycling rate and promote sustainable social development. </jats:p>