A Tool for the Selection of Food Waste Management Approaches for the Hospitality and Food Service Sector in the UK

Reviewer 2

1

Dear authors,

your research is an interesting effort in field of food waste management, particularly in the field of hospitality sector that is a major contributor. Your research seems quite detailed; however, the presentation becomes often rather tiresome for the reader. Below, you may find several comments for the improvement of the quality of your manuscript:

Thank you for your positive comment. We acknowledge the study is rather lengthy and pondered over reducing it. Following your comment, we felt certain that this is the right way to go about it and tried to cut out some potentially unnecessary information and move it to the Supplementary Materials (e.g. details on regulations in the UK that may not be relevant to all, nor to support the flow of the study itself). The manuscript remains lengthy as we felt that some clarification referring to the UK context needed to remain in the manuscript for a proper interpretation of information. Also because, in other spatial contexts, some aspects might differ from the UK.

We considered all of your constructive comments below and you can find the improved version on track changes. 

2

Although the motivation is extensive and clearly presented in the introduction, the description of the scope of the paper is missing. At the same time, 1-2 research questions and how they are going to be tackled are also meaningful in the introductory section of a scientific paper. At the end, a paragraph describing the remainder of the paper could be helpful for the reader. 

We agree that adding a paragraph that would help the reader navigate through the manuscript is a useful addition. We added the following text:

“As businesses in the HaFS sector may vary in size and services provided, the FW generated may also vary in volume and composition. At the same time, selecting the best available techniques for FWM to reduce negative impacts and promote circularity requires a tailored-based approach, a prerequisite often overlooked. Depending on their needs, local conditions, and cost, the HaFS sector can employ various methods for FWM, which can be on-site or off-site. However, the decision-making tools that support such decisions are lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by offering a conceptual decision-making tool that helps select appropriate and commercially available FW processing techniques for the HaFS sector, choosing the UK as a case study. The development of the decision-making framework is supported by an explorative analysis of commercially available FWM processes complemented by a scoping analysis of their technical feasibility and regulatory viability in the UK and a systematic evidence map-ping of their life-cycle impacts, including environmental, economic, social and technological aspects. The study is designed in two parts. In part one, a suite of on-site and off-site FWM processes that the HaFS sector could employ is identified, and their performance is scrutinised. In the second part, a two-tier framework is developed to support the HaFS sector's decision-making process concerning selecting the optimal FWM option. The framework is informed by context-specific characteristics (i.e., the UK) (reported as Tier-1) and a comparative sustainability performance matrix (reported as Tier 2) on the identified FWM options (incl. on-site, off-site and combinations of them).

Following Introduction, the Methodology section describes the systematic evidence map protocol we followed to identify the sustainability performance of FWM processes that could be employed by the HaFS sector could employ in the UK (Section 2). The Results section consists of a sub-section related to the available FWM processes in the UK (Section 3.1), including key technical and regulatory considerations for the use of on-site (Section 3.1.1) and off-site (Section 3.1.2) FWM processes and a sub-section related to the conceptual decision-making tool (Section 3.2) formed by Tier 1 (Section 3.2.1) and Tier 2 (Section 3.2.1); the Discussion section (Section 4); and the Conclusions section (Section 5).”

3

Compared to the rest of the paper, the methodological section is rather brief. A more detailed presentation of Figure 1 would be insightful.

Thank you for your suggestion. We explained the flow of the PRISMA graph (Figure 1). At the same time, more information regarding the search terms, the number of hits and how Boolean operators were used is provided in Supplementary Materials A. By this; we believe that the PRISMA graph is explained sufficiently. In the main text, we added the following:

“The lists with the key terms along with the number of hits for each term and how Boolean operators were used to combining the search terms is provided in Supplementary material A (Table A-1).

[…]

At the first screening stage, studies were screened for eligibility by reading the title and the abstract. Studies that fulfilled the eligibility criteria or studies that were not clear whether they were eligible or not at the first stage of screening were screened more thoroughly at the second stage of screening by reading the full text. In total, we identified 91 eligible studies.”

4

The results section is a little bit confusing. There are some subsections (with titles without numbering). Are they a different subsection? At the same time, I would propose to divide the results from the discussion so that your offer to more distinct and concise sections. 

We have added multi-level numbering in all sub-headings to avoid any confusion by the readers. Additionally, we divided the Results section into Results (Section 3) and Discussion (Section 4). Please, visit the manuscript to see how we addressed this.

5

Conclusions are a more like a brief summary of the paper. I would propose to indicate clearly you policy implications/recommendations to highlight the contribution of your work. At the same time, it would be nice to explain, in more detail, how this framework could be on international interest/impact and not only in the UK. Future research directions should be also improved and tailored.

Indeed, the first part of Conclusions read more like a summary as we felt that after the long results section, this could be needed. However, it is unnecessary; thank you for pointing this out to us.

The Conclusions Section has been revised extensively, and some new sentences have been added to address your suggestion.  We believe that these amendments now bring the essence of the study out more clearly. 

This is as follows:

“No single FWM option outperforms all other options across all sustainability impact categories. This could be attributed to limited quantitative and qualitative evidence on the sustainability performance of on-site FWM systems and the fact that FWM options can perform differently in different settings, making it difficult to draw robust conclusions. A bespoke, tailored-based approach is needed to select the most sustainable FWM option that is likely to deliver maximum value. Further case study-specific research could shed more light on the potential of different FWM options to return sustainability benefits.

The two-tier decision-making tool developed herein could facilitate the adoption of a tailor-based approach as it helps those interested in promoting sustainable FWM in their businesses to navigate through the breadth of FWM options and evaluate their feasibility and viability according to area-specific characteristics and circumstances. The criteria used are simple and may be specific to the UK context; still, they are steering and, thus, relevant to other areas making the tool versatile and applicable to other spatial contexts. Local specificities (e.g., waste composition, assurance of processing capacity, logistical characteristics of the region, marketability of end-products) and consideration of existing and planned regulatory requirements (e.g., EPR permit, trade effluent consent, and biogas, digestate and compost quality assurance), space requirements, technical knowledge, support and monitoring are needed to inform the process. Moreover, additional criteria can easily be incorporated into the decision-making framework by those in charge of the selection process to account for context-specificities. Tier 2 can and should, be tailored to specific areas for measuring the area-specific environmental, economic, and social impacts. Therefore, this two-tier framework makes it easy to support the different practitioners’ needs and highlights the importance of user-generated evidence. In turn, this emphasises that all stakeholders (i.e., HaFS practitioners, water and waste industry, regulators and policy-makers) participation in decision-making processes is critical. With its proper use, the framework can enable policy development in food waste management. Additionally, it can monitor the progress of adopted FWM processes.”

6

The title is too verbose, please try to shorten it.

We shorten the title of the manuscript as follows:

“A tool for the selection of food waste management approaches for the hospitality and food service sector in the UK”

7

The citations in the text are not inserted as asked by the editor. 

Thank you for catching this; an unintentional omission from our end. The bibliography and citations were formatted according to the MDPI reference style.

8

Is Figure 2 your own elaboration? If so, please indicate so in the caption for clarity reasons.

We clarified in the caption that Figure 2 is our elaboration by adding the following:

“(as conceived by the authors of this research)”

9

I could find the supplementary material (however, I do not know if this was due to your fault). 

The supplementary material has been provided and is available along with the main manuscript.

10

The format of the paper seems to be hastily written (there are some typos and minor errors). 

It was more of an effect of being too invested in it, not seeing how difficult it could be for the reader to flow. We went through the whole manuscript carefully and corrected sentences, shortened them to enable better comprehension and corrected all typos or minor errors.