Prioritization of Critical Success Factors in Industrial Waste Management by Environmental Engineers and Employees
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors of the manuscript entitled "Prioritization of Critical Success Factors in Industrial Waste Management by Experts and Employees" have performed a wide experimental and review job. In my opinion the topic is interesting and deserves publication because it can be applicable to several industrial fields. However I have a few recommendations that I believe they can improve the word.
1. In the introduction section it must be included a paragraph about the relevance and innovation of this work in comparison to others that have been published before.
2. In the conclusion section it must be included a final paragraph of a recommendation for how the other industries must performed the work.
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable comments to improve our manuscript. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe research design, questions, hypotheses and methods must be clearly stated in the introduction section.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe research design, questions, hypotheses and methods must be clearly stated in the introduction section.
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable comments to improve our manuscript. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis study effectively prioritizes critical success factors in industrial waste management using the Analytical Hierarchy Process, identifying the most crucial factor. The results are presented clearly, and the discussion is well-executed. However, I suggest the authors improve the literature review and methodology sections.
Literature Review: Although informative, the literature review is overly lengthy and requires summarization for better clarity. Currently, many paragraphs begin with phrases like "someone's research found/talked about/etc." Organizing this section into several sub-sections based on different topics would enhance readability.
Materials and Methods: This section uses excessive words to describe the research methods rather than detailing their application in this study. Additionally, the involvement of five experts may not be sufficient to ensure the validity of the results. Providing more information about these experts (e.g., years of experience, professional fields) would help evaluate the reliability of the study.
The scores for methods and scientific soundness are lower due to these reservations, not because of any issues with the statistical methods or the scientific reasoning, which are both robust.
Furthermore, there are 16 tables in the main body of the manuscript. Moving some of them to the Appendix would enhance the flow of the paper. Additionally, Table 16 could be improved for better clarity.
The manuscript should also include sections on Author Contributions, Funding, Data Availability Statement, and Conflicts of Interest. Additionally, some technical editing is necessary for the references.
The English language and scientific writing are on a high level.
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable comments to improve our manuscript. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis work focus on the prioritization of critical success factors in waste management by combined AHP and survey methods. There are a lot of issues for the authors to address:
1)extensive repetition of statement make the whole work a burden for the readers to read. For example, after the section 1 introduction (almost 2 pages), there are huge amount of repeated statements similar as introduction from line 160-303 (it is another 3 pages long!). While the rest in Line 111-159, can be placed in the materials and methods in section 3. It make the whole manuscript structure and design not so clear.
2) confusing and improper statement across the manuscript. For instance, line 12-14, what you wanna express? Line 43-44, Citation please. The five types of wastes are not classified by the authors, right? What is the reference to support this classification? Line 54-55 What do you mean by comparing 2010 with 2010, same year, the waste increased by 5.1%? Line 590-592,This statement is not proper based on the US RCRA. Different types of waste, their management are different. It is a scientific paper, the statement or description should be objective based on evidences and cited reference or data.
3) Line 19, are these five expert environmental engineers licensed or certificated engineers (e.g., PE license?). Since they get involved in your work and this work will be available to the public, the 5 engineers names should be released in this work (half of the conclusions in this work is significantly determined by these 5 engineers opinion, their name must be in this work to take the responsibility. They should take the liability if this work's conclusion mislead the government waste management policies). This matters as it will significantly weaken your assessment method if they are non-certificated ones.
4) Due to the method used in this work, for instance, collect the opinions of employees to determine the priority factor in WM, this manuscript is more suitable to journals covering social science, not sustainability. In Line 311-314, 101 response out of 2000. The database seems too small, which will significantly weaken the statement in this work.
5) In 3.2.1, It is better to visualize the AHP by providing a flow chart as what it is normally shown.
6) The titles for double y axis is missing in Figure 2-5. What does blue bar and orange curve mean?
7) Grammar and typo issues. Line 19 To avoid repeated words, through is better; Line 24, what is CSF short for when first mentioned? Line 38 what is OECD short for? Line 71 Grammar error, please delete methods; Line 105 Reference is better than literature; Table 13 grammar error, it is comma. Line 667, extra space, please delete
Comments on the Quality of English Language
The work is not well written. Here are the issues:
1) extensive repetition of statement make the whole work a burden for the readers to read. For example, after the section 1 introduction (almost 2 pages), there are huge amount of repeated statements similar as introduction from line 160-303 (it is another 3 pages long!). While the rest in Line 111-159, can be placed in the materials and methods in section 3. It make the whole manuscript structure and design not so clear.
2) Grammar and typo issues. Line 19 To avoid repeated words, through is better; Line 24, what is CSF short for when first mentioned? Line 38 what is OECD short for? Line 71 Grammar error, please delete methods; Line 105 Reference is better than literature; Table 13 grammar error, it is comma. Line 667, extra space, please delete
3）confusing and improper statement across the manuscript. For instance, line 12-14, what you wanna express? Line 43-44, Citation please. The five types of wastes are not classified by the authors, right? What is the reference to support this classification? Line 54-55 What do you mean by comparing 2010 with 2010, same year, the waste increased by 5.1%? Line 590-592,This statement is not proper based on the US RCRA. Different types of waste, their management are different. It is a scientific paper, the statement or description should be objective based on evidences and cited reference or data.
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable comments to improve our manuscript. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authorsaccept
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable comments and acceptance of the paper.
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe work has been greatly improved after revision. Here are two technical concern:
1) The 5 engineer's opinion weighed too much of the work's conclusion and the analysis. It is not so convincing in my opinion. I may put a warning sign in the abstract to indicate that it is the opinion of just 5 engineers in Turkey.
2) The survey size is still questionable after the explanation in the response letter. The margin of error (10%) seems too large. Normally, to ensure the reliability of the survey covering 17000000 workers in Turkey as described by the team, at least 385 response are needed to ensure 95% confidence level with 5% of the margin of error. The team only provided 101 response.
As is shown above, these two factors are the key factors to control the conclusion and analysis of the work. But both of them were not well planned to ensure reliability of the work.
Author Response
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Response to Reviewer 4 Comments
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1. Summary |
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We are thankful to you for your time and valuable and constructive suggestions that were very helpful to us in improving our manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted with red color for the improvements according to your suggesstions in the revised manuscript. |
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2. Point-by-point response to Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Comment 1) The 5 engineer's opinion weighed too much of the work's conclusion and the analysis. It is not so convincing in my opinion. I may put a warning sign in the abstract to indicate that it is the opinion of just 5 engineers in Turkey. Response 1: The word “expert” was removed in lines 19 and 22. In line 21, the word “engineers” was added.
In Türkiye, there is no PE license; however many universities and engineering departments have either ABET or MÜDEK* accreditations. We gathered information from the engineers who were graduates of accredited universities. *MÜDEK is recognized by the Higher Education Quality Board of Türkiye as the National Quality Assurance Agency in accrediting engineering programs. MÜDEK is a full member of ENAEE (European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education). https://www.mudek.org.tr/en/ana/ilk.shtm
Comment 2) The survey size is still questionable after the explanation in the response letter. The margin of error (10%) seems too large. Normally, to ensure the reliability of the survey covering 17000000 workers in Turkey as described by the team, at least 385 response are needed to ensure 95% confidence level with 5% of the margin of error. The team only provided 101 response. Response 2: We agree that, undoubtedly 384 surveys with a 5% margin of error would have increased the reliability and sensitivity of the study. But, we have confronted many scientific studies which use 95 % confidence level with 10 % of the margin of error. Tha data we collected at those days were very valuable. The number of survey returns could have been increased with face-to-face interviews. However, the data collection time of this thesis coincided with the intense period of the COVID pandemic.
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Round 3
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe work is indeed improved. I would strongly suggest to put a warning sign in the abstract to indicate that it is the opinion of just 5 engineers in Turkey with a very compromising survey results, indicating readers to judge by themselves whether the work is reliable or not. The two comments I left in my 2nd review (this is the 3rd review), frankly, the authors did not take it seriously, especially my 2nd comments questioning their survey reliability. They claim a lot of published papers using 10% margin error, so it should be easy to find these papers, but they did not provide me specific papers (especially high quality papers) which use 10% margin errors. Why?
Author Response
We would like to apologize for making you think that we were not taking your suggestions seriously. We tried our best this time. We hope that we could have updated our manuscript according to your suggestions.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
