A Systematic Literature Review of Concepts and Factors Related to Pro-Environmental Consumer Behaviour in Relation to Waste Management Through an Interdisciplinary Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for submitting this work, and great job on the systematic review and locating all work and summarizing this in the charts within. As it stands, the paper itself is very, very hard to read - the English needs extensive re-working and the structure is laborious. If you could find a way to edit the content so that you spend less space summarizing and categorizing the field, and more time drawing out key conclusions and combining these in a meaningful way to arrive at fewer, clear summary points, that would be great. At present, I'm struggling to appreciate if this piece has any practical utility as it stands. 

some specific comments below:

 

Abstract

This abstract overall uses a lot of technical terminology, and may be better re-worded focusing on communicating in more clear and direct terms the main, interesting findings of the work.

• Define ‘post utilization’
• ‘Conceptualizations’ – what do you mean by this? Definitions or theories?
• Points 2) and 3). This is a bit vague. I wouldn’t be able to deduce form this what your findings were. Could you re-summarize with some slightly more tangible content here (i.e. what specific influence situations? Which conditions and factors?)
• Define ‘criticalities’

 

Introduction

Unclear on the structure of this piece – is this requested by the journal? Why is section 2 after section 5? Please clarify

Please review the use of English language throughout

I’d like to see a much longer introduction giving more complex on the issue. What is the post utilization phase? why should we care about it? whats the comparative impact on the environment versus the purchase phase? What do you mean by interdisciplinary? Why is this approach valuable compared to just single discipline? What are some of the major publications on this topic that the reader should be aware of?

 

Research question

Qu2. Unclear what you mean by ‘interplay’ – are you basing this on some kind of framework? It’s hard to understand what question you are asking here

 

Section 2.1

138-139 – inserted text error here

Section 2.2

Question 2 – need references for your statement here: ‘In fact, the pro-environmental consumer is often driven by 163 altruistic concerns, whereas the generic consumer is more influenced by a hedonistic or 164 egocentric approach.’

Question 3 – what do you define as conditions? Are you using a framework to identify these?

Question 4 – what are these ‘critical aspects’?

 

Section 2.4

Check the English here – very hard to understand

2.4.3 – there are generic risk of bias tools that you can use here for papers with different underlying formats. Would you consider locating one to conduct the RoB analysis?

 

Section 3.1

Please explain how your inclusion criteria (i.e. only English language papers) might influence the geographic spread of papers (i.e you didn’t actively search for papers in Chinese)

3.1.2

Did your review include a focus on other FMCG i.e. beauty products, washing detergents?

If not, why?

 

Section 3.2.1

Should this include a definition of the post-purchase use phase?

 

Models outlined in section 3.2.2.5 should go in appendices, and the text here summarise this in a more succinct way. Table 2 is most useful here.

3.2.2.3 more interesting this section. Can you expand on justifications for combination of these models? Why did the authors decide to do this?

3.2.4 anything about the explanatory value of these different approaches? Which is considered the ‘best’ model, or accounts for the most variance in behavior?

Research question 2 – still confused about what is meant by the term ‘interplay’ here and what you are specifically analyzing in this section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please find my comments in the file attached.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

See the attachement

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

On the one hand, I find the paper rather lengthy. Many concepts are repeated several times and sometimes the text is not well-organized (for example I would move lines 94-110 to the introduction). Therefore, I think the paper needs substantial reorganization and streamlining.   On the other hand, some aspects would deserve a wider discussion. For example, in the introduction, the authors could clarify which type of "interplay between the pro-environmental consumer behavior (PECB) and the generic one" they have in mind. Another example concerns section 3.1.1: it remains unclear what's the take-away message of the patterns shown, especially in relation to the research questions.  

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Many thanks to authors for taking the time to respond so thoroughly and thoughtfully to my review, the content added to this second draft is very useful and definitions of terms most helpful.

I do, however, still feel that the paper could benefit from restructuring and rationalizing. The emphasis and most interesting aspect of this paper is, to me, sections 3.2 -3.5, where authors outline the different theories used to explain disposal behavior and how these are integrated. As the paper is still very long, I would recommend rationalizing or placing most of the descriptive section (3.1) into appendix to allow for the new content you have added into section 3.2 and onward to be the main emphasis of the paper.

To justify, as a reader, I’d mainly be interested to understand what factors influence disposal behavior, why, and how these interrelate. While the classification of the evidence sources is useful to reference in order to understand the overall research available, I don’t think it’s essential to have this categorized into timelines/geographies in order to gauge the value of the research conducted. Additionally, there is no objective standard to judge when ‘enough’ research is available (i.e. studies per 10 million inhabitants). I’d be more concerned with the quality of the research (i.e. one or two very good quality RCTs with adequate power) than quantity and spread. Hence why the risk of bias in the available research might be more useful content to include than detailed breakdown as you currently have.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

As suggested, the paper has been restructured and rationalized by placing most of the descriptive section 3.1.1. ("Temporal and Geographical Analysis") in Appendix A.

Authors are available to better describe how factors interrelate by adding some examples, but they lack of time because they have been given 2 days only for providing their second review. If editor allows for a slightly longer timeframe, they may do so.

The quality of our SLR has been assessed through a risk of bias tool (ROBIS). Please refer to attached file for the detailed analysis with ROBIS. At present, this file is not included in the manuscript to avoid excessive length of the paper. Obviously, it may be included in an appendix.

Please note a new version (v1.3) of the Excel Supplementary Material (SM) has been uploaded on Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.3842160. Version 1.3 includes further details on the data extraction protocol. 

Best regards,

Alessandro Concari

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf