Municipal Wastewater Reuse: Is it a Competitive Alternative to Seawater Desalination?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
There is nothing wrong with this manuscript, it just just doesn’t have anything very innovative in it. It is a nice technical demonstration of a choice between water supplies including obvious elements in its scenarios, and it won’t surprise anyone. That said, it is nice to see the calculations run carefully. This work looks more like a well designed lecture example used in an upper division course than a journal article, and I suspect that may be its origin. But it looks well done, it is clearly written, and drinking water is very important and will be increasingly an urgent matter.
Author Response
Point 1: There is nothing wrong with this manuscript, it just just doesn’t have anything very innovative in it. It is a nice technical demonstration of a choice between water supplies including obvious elements in its scenarios, and it won’t surprise anyone. That said, it is nice to see the calculations run carefully. This work looks more like a well designed lecture example used in an upper division course than a journal article, and I suspect that may be its origin. But it looks well done, it is clearly written, and drinking water is very important and will be increasingly an urgent matter.
Response 1: Thank you for your comments. We believe that this work contributes to the current strand of literature by proposing a novel methodology to select, from an economic point of view, the most appropriate non-conventional water resource between municipal wastewater and seawater in order to supply water when the implementation of water production projects is studied.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper deals with a very important issue of water scarcity, which is a big problem in numerous regions all over the world. It is written in clear English, the topics are well described, so it is easy to follow the authors' lines of thought.
In my opinion it is a well elaborated case study for Chile, but for other regions of the world it can be only an inspiration for similar study. Especially the conclusion are not universal and depend on many local circumstances.
Maybe the title could be improved.
Author Response
"Please see the attachment."
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The topic of the paper under the title “Municipal wastewater reuse: How to know it is a competitive alternative to seawater desalination?” is interesting and current. The manuscript is quite well written and most of the figures and tables are comprehensive. However, some issues require clarification and improvement. Please find some suggestions below.
- Please add the "financial analysis" to the keywords. The article is based on such an analysis and it should be noted.
- The description of the scenarios (subsection 2.1) would be clearer to readers if it were in the form of bullets.
- Item [34] in the References is from 2010. On its basis, the authors have adopted some operating and maintenance costs (Table 2). Are the data up-to-date enough?
- Line 174 – On what basis was the time equal to 20 years assumed?
- Using lumped references is not recommended. Please avoid citing more than three items in one place (e.g. in lines 309-310).
- It is a very good move to include tables S1-S6 in Supplementary Materials. However, table S7 should be included in the main text as it contains a lot of important information.
- The last section (Conclusions) should describe the limitations of the research and the directions of further research.
- Some parts of the text have incorrect formatting (see lines 225-234, 330-341).
- The "Author Contributions" section is missing from the manuscript.
Good luck!
Author Response
"Please see the attachment."
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
