Do Sociodemographic Characteristics in Waste Management Matter? Case Study of Recyclable Generation in the Czech Republic
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The proposed research « Do socio-demographic characteristics in waste management matter? Case study of the production of recyclables in the Czech Republic » falls within the scope of Sustainability. According to the reviewer’s opinion, major revisions are required in order to accept this research study for publication in Sustainability. Please, comply with the following suggestions and comments:
Comment 1: In my opinion, the aforementioned manuscript needs more data in order to be published in Sustainability. It approaches the subject very theoretically. I am not so sure if your readers will find innovative data in this work.
Comment 2: Concluding remarks – authors must elaborate more on what is their contribution. The question that it needs to be answered is how it extends the existing knowledge on the topic.
Comment 3: More recent papers in the field should be integrated in the literature review.
Carefully check the references, so as to make sure they are all complete and follow the Guidelines to Authors.
Comment 4: When you submit the corrected version, please do check thoroughly, in order to avoid grammar flaws.
Author Response
I thank you for your comments, detailed answeres are in the attached document.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for submitting your manuscript to the Sustainability journal. The topic of the manuscript fits into the scope of the journal. The structure of the manuscript does not respect the Scientific Best Practice as the conclusions are missing. It remains unclear why the focus was set only on recyclables, while usually such studies focus on the complete waste stream of municipal waste. In the current version, the manuscript does not have the quality of a peer reviewed scientific publication. Further, there are other comments to make.
Introduction
In the introduction was prepared a more or less comprehensive literature review. Anyhow, information on the correlation between the household income and increasing waste generation rates. Reference was tried to make to a correlation between the household income and decreasing waste generation rates. However, there are also several studies on the between the household income and increasing waste generation rates. Further, general data on the Czech waste management system, the collection system, municispal waste generation rates, generation rates per waste stream, GDP and average household income must be added.
Materials and Methods
The materials and methods are not clearly described. I propose to include a scheme that illustrates the working steps. There was given a list of indicators that were used for the calculation of the correlations. From my point of view, at least an indicator on the average household income is missing, which might have an important impact on the results. There is not any information about the types of recyclables. This must be added. Is there visible an impact of the types of recyclables ? Social analysis methods should be added to provide the manuscript with more scientific depth.
Results
The results section is unstructured and remains vague. What are the results ?
Discussion
The discussion of the 13 socio-demographic variables and their impacts is missing. Each of it must be discussed separately.
Conclusions
The conclusions are missing and must be added.
Author Response
I thank you for your comments, detailed answeres are in the attached document.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
# The manuscript by Kristyna Rybova presents a case study about the production of recyclables in the Czech Republic. The manuscript is relevant to the scope of the Journal. However, there are few issues to be addressed before accepting this manuscript for the Journal. Based on my comments, I recommend the manuscript to publish after a minor revision. Following are the detailed comments.
-The abstract of a good journal paper always ends outlining the benefits of the study findings and recommendations as a way forward. The manuscript is missing such 1-2 lines in the abstract.
-Authors should explicitly specify the novelty of their work. What progress against the most recent state-of-the-art similar case studies were made in this study? Mention this in the revised manuscript.
-Under section, discussion, it is recommended to discuss and explain what should be the appropriate policies based on the findings of this study. Also, the results should be further elaborated to show how they could be used for real applications.
-Don’t use the notion like ‘we’ or ‘our’ etc., as these are the redundant words (not the research words) for the standard journal manuscripts.
-It is strongly recommended to add a subsection, ‘practical implications of this study,’ outlining the challenges in the current research, future work, and recommendations, before the conclusion.
Author Response
I thank you for your comments, detailed answeres are in the attached document.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have complied with my suggestions. Therefore the paper should be accepted for publication in its current form.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your comments
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for providing the revised version of the manuscript. My comments have been considered in a comprehensive way.
Nevertheless, I have two recommendations left for the title: as it is unusual to talk about waste "production" (as waste is not produced as a product), I recommend to use the word "generation", which is the usual word. The title should be changed into: Do socio-demographic characteristics in waste management matter? Case study of the generation of recyclables in the Czech Republic.
Further, from my point of view, the manuscript does not have the originality of an article, but should be classified as case report (above the title).
Author Response
Thank you very much for your comments. I considered also your new comments and changed the title of the paper "Do sociodemographic characteristics in waste management matter? Case study of recyclable generation in the Czech Republic". Thank you also for the remark regarding the type or originality of the article but I would like to stay with the article, I hope that thank to your review and the reviews of other reviewers the article gained more context and deeper understanding of the topic. In the Czech scientific community there is big difference in perception of article and case report and to achieve the intended attention it woulb be really important to clasify the paper as article. I hope the explanation is comprehensive and can be considered in favor of the current clasification of the reviewed paper.
