Development of a Municipal Solid Waste Management Life Cycle Assessment Tool for Banepa Municipality, Nepal

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I read this paper with pleasure as an LCA and waste management specialist, but I thought I discovered a lot of professional inaccuracies in this work. Please strive to correct these inaccuracies so that your scientific work can reach a higher standard.

- It would be important to bring Figure 3 forward, already where 3.3 is first mentioned. to chapter.

- 2.4.6. chapter, please mention the inceneration temperature.

- From an LCA perspective, Figure 4 reflects an incorrect way of representation. Only applying of normalization and weighting methods can the environmental impact categories be compared in percentage and displayed on a single diagram!! I ask the authors to normalize and weight the impact category values from eq. to kilograms (or tons) and then show the percentage comparison of these values on a single diagram. After that, evaluate the results here in chapter 3.1.

- It would be important to rewrite the Conclusions chapter. It's quite short and I can't accept it professionally either.

- I can't find comparisons with the previous works of authors who also set up waste management scenarios for MSW. I recommend reviewing the following literature and comparing the obtained results with these literatures (by the way, the number of referenced literatures in this work is very few, so a review of much more literature would be relevant). 

(1)

Civancik-Uslu, D., Puig, R., Ferrer, L., and Fullana-i-Palmer, P. (2019). Influence of end-of-life allocation, credits and other methodological issues in LCA of compounds: An in-company circular economy case study on packaging. J. Clean. Prod. 212, pp. 925–940. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.12.076

(2)

Mannheim V (2022) Perspective: Comparison of end-of-life scenarios of municipal solid waste from the viewpoint of life cycle assessment. Front. Built Environ. 8:991589. doi: 10.3389/fbuild.2022.991589

(3)

Alwaeli, M. (2016). End-of-life vehicle recovery and recycling and the route to comply with eu directive targets. Environment. Prot. Eng. 42, 191–202. doi:10.37190/epe160114

(4)

Avató, J.L., and Mannheim, V. (2022). Life cycle assessment model of a catering product: Comparing environmental impacts for different end-of-life scenarios. Energies 15, 5423. doi:10.3390/en15155423

 

- References to the basic LCA standards regarding LCI and LCA methodology are also missing (International Organization for Standardizations: ISO 14040:2006, 14044:2006). The authors refer to a single standard in line 126, but unfortunately, the referenced literature is numbered 18, not the literature referring to the referenced standard!

 

- I had a hard time finding LCIA method (Recipe Midpoint (H) V 1.13) method in this paper. I found it only with the applied database (Ecoinvent 3.6) together (line 149). Mention the year in relation to the applied LCIA method in few sentences, and also why they chose this method.

Extensive editing of English language required. 

 

 

 

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents LCA of municipal solid waste management in a place in Nepal.
It is well written, but I have some specific comments.

Figure 3 should be closer to the place where it was mentioned. Page numbers seem to be inside the figure.

Table 2: I recommend to insert a row with the sum of each column at the end.

It says that according to Table 3, S3 has the lowest GWP contribution of 974.82 (in the text it says 989.86), but the GWP contribution of S4 is just 966.43. Please check all numbers again, both in continuous text as in the tables.

Figure 4: The label of the x-axis should be percentage. Since all values of ADP are negative, it looks as if S1 had the highest contribution whereas in reality, it has the lowest.

Figure 5: The colours used in the bar charts are not consistent.

Reference 4 only has one author. New Zealand is the place, not the name of another author.

Check authors and URL of reference 29.

Is the tool available online?

In the conclusion, are you able to give a recommendation on which scenario is best. S4 has the lowest GWP, but a rather high HTP. What does this imply? How could it be improved?

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors attempted a good study on “Development of a Municipal Solid Waste Management Life Cycle Assessment Tool for Banepa Municipality, Nepal”. I believe that the idea of this study has potential to be published, although I would recommend some changes in the manuscript. Suggestions to improve the quality of manuscript are as follows:

·       First letter of all the words in the keywords must be in uppercase.

·       Add the list of abbreviations.

·       Add 3-4 highlights of the manuscript.

·       Highlights should summarize the research methodology and findings.

·       Keywords should be arranged in chronological order.

·       What research gaps does the current paper fill?

·       Improve the scientific discussion on the long-term retention phase and compare the results with other studies.

·       In some sections, there are grammatical errors.

·       Findings of the study at many places need proper justification, authors are suggested to take help from other scientific researches and correct them accordingly.

·       Rewrite first paragraph of introduction of the manuscript.

·       Please refer and quote similar studies carried out in section 3.3.3.

·       Please ensure that every reference cited in the text and the figure(s) is also in the reference list (and vice versa).

·       Conclusions are difficult to read and do not summarize the main findings of the paper.

·       Check reference formatting. Check the guidelines of sustainability.

·       Please go through the following research articles for better understanding of the concerned topic:

       https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.113424

       https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.113953

       https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.133852

            https://doi.org/10.1680/jwarm.20.00022

      If it is appropriate then only, authors can site these papers in their revised MS.

 

EDITING IS REQUIRED.

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

this paper has been rewritten, and the figures have been prepared by the expectations of the reviewers' opinions.

Important: English grammar should be reviewed in this paper. I am thinking here mainly of the use of which and that, the use of commas and the spelling of words (e.g. consideraebly).

Although the Authors write this as an answer, "The articles suggested by the reviewer is referred and relevant literatures have been cited and results were compared with the relevant past studies", - in the literature and references, I did not notice any changes in the article compared to the previous version. I still miss comparing the author's work to other authors' work. Please mark the sentences when the comparisons were written.

Moderate editing of the English language is required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors have complied all the comments

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for the thorough comments which allowed us to revise and improve our work.