Litter Reduction during Beach Closure in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Quantifying the Impact of Users on Beach Litter Generation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Souza Filho et al. quantified marine litter before and during the COVID pandemic in Brazilian urban touristic beaches. This is a simple but very interesting study. I have some comments and requests, as detailed below:

- Abstract: Change “the pandemic” to “the COVID pandemic”.

- Introduction: Please review the sentence “Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious illness caused by the newly discovered severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).” In my opinion, “newly discovered” is not appropriate anymore. Also, some information about COVID-related restrictions in Brazil should be mentioned and referenced.

- Study area: I suggest including an additional figure with representative photographs of the beaches included in the study. These images are important to contextualize the reader about the landscapes in which the study was performed, especially for non-Brazilian readers.

- Figure 1: The figure legend is incomplete in the PDF file.

- Page 6, second line: Replace “SARS-CoV-2 virus” with “SARS-CoV-2”. The “V” already means "virus".

- Methods, general comment: This information/paragraph “The monitoring activities conducted in this study were authorized by the municipal management, even during the validity of the beach interdiction decrees, as they are part of a study started in February 2019 within the scope of the Projeto de Monitoramento dos Resíduos Sólidos em Praias Turísticas da América Latina – RSPT/LATAM (Solid Waste Management in Touristic Beaches in Latin America Project, in English), an initiative of the Red Iberoamericana de Gestión y Certificación de Playas – PROPLAYAS (Iberoamerican Beach Management and Certification Network, in English).” should be placed at the beginning of the methods section (and maybe the following paragraph: “In view of…”).

 

- Results, Table 2: The table (first columns) is cut in the PDF file.

- Results, p-values: I suggest always displaying exact p-values, not rounded values (e.g., p<0.05, p<0.001).

- Conclusions and abstract: “up to 83%” or “up to 88%”? Review it at these points and also in the Results section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a study quantifying beach litter in three Brazilian beaches before and after COVID-19 restrictions. The study is well presented and addresses the significant issue of beach litter due to beach-going activities.

A few specific comments:

The file is missing line numbers so I will be copy-pasting the entire sentences here.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious illness caused by the newly
discovered severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). – sentence is missing an article.

Considering that, after this long period of confinement and restrictions, and because
these are outdoor environments, usually associated with health promotion and leisure-related practices, beaches will possibly be one of the most sought out environments in the
post-pandemic period [25]. – considering what?, sentence is missing a complement or needs restructuring

combined with having one of the lowest annual temperature ranges of the world, varying between 20° and 34°C [30]. – authors probably mean lowest annual temperature range changes and not ranges

Figure 1: Location of the studied beaches along the Todos os Santos Bay (insert 1) and the Atlantic (inserts 2 and 3)
shorelines, municipality of Salvador (highlighted in the upper right insert), state of Bahia, Brazil. Red polygons represent – missing rest of sentence

In each beach, marine litter was counted – but not collected – from 100 m-long transects, covering the entire subaerial beach width (Figure 1). – why not collected?

Table 2 is not entirely visible and cell dimensions should be changed to fit month names

Accordingly, the largest surveillance and control apparatus used to restrict access to the beach, including the installation of physical barriers, was observed at Porto da
Barra Beach, resulting in greater reduction of its use by the population compared to other
beaches (Figure 4). – this seems like a very important point that perhaps is not stressed enough and likely partially invalidates the assumption of no-use of the beaches during the lockdown and hence reduces the significance of the results for the beaches were the restrictions were not enforced. This is addressed in the discussion which is good, however maybe an analysis could have been performed to identify sources of allochtonous litter and whether the general restrictions and lockdown could have resulted in a reduced allochtonous litter influx on the beaches of this study (reduced pedestrian traffic in nearby areas could result in less littering in those areas and less influx of rainwater-borne on wind-borne litter in the beaches), hence altering the composition and ratios of litter.

ii) Often times, litter from previous campaigns fail to be removed by public cleaning agents and can be recounted during the following month, particularly for small items
such as cigarette butts and straws. This limitation of the current cleaning method used in
Salvador’s beaches has been previously addressed by other authors [13, 29]. – this also raises the issue of why the litter was not collected

This is a significant reduction that might be achievable by an effective increase in awareness and by changing the of habits of beach users. – the habits of beach users

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf