Life Cycle Assessments of Takeaway Food and Beverage Packaging: The Role of Consumer Behavior
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper provides a critical review of the different Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies available on takeaway food and beverage packaging. The review includes interesting information on littering phenomena and consumer behavior. The overview is very comprehensive and is a strong guide for future LCA studies. It is of benefit to peers from around the globe and the paper is therefore recommended for publication in Sustainability. It can be published.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This review study is interesting because it touches upon an interdisciplinary aspect of LCA. There are a few recommendations from the reviewer to improve the paper as follow:
- The organization of the review should be summarized in a “research framework” figure so that readers can expect the flow and what to come.
- Since we are talking about consumer’s behavior, then things that affect such factor should be discussed. Among which are regulations/policy/culture/ and the technologies that could encourage or discourage littering and waste separation behavior.
- Line 131: the condition of the google scholar search has to be elaborated; since the time span was “all years”, report exactly when was it conducted since the result will change overtime.
- Line 143: there is a technical error here.
- The conclusion part should be sharpen. Please provide recommendations to each relevant stakeholders. Such as the policy maker, the practictioner, the research community, and more importantly what would the economic/environmental/social gains that would be achieved if the identified gaps are to be filled? Lastly, what is the larger implication of this study?
- Overall, this review paper is too short to be a review paper because usually a review paper contains at least a hundred of references, whereas this paper barely make half of it. The reviewer would encourage compiling references that has similar messages. For example, in table 1, instead reporting the title, which is meaningless, it would be more meaningful to report here, the main findings of several similar papers, and thus the reference column would be filled with at least three references.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The reviewed paper tackles an interesting problem. Its general aims and hypothesis are worth considering, and the final work can interest the reader. However, this paper, in its current stage, is not feasible for publication due to two significant methodological shortages:
1. Selection of paper and their limited (insufficient) number
2. Lack of quantitative analyses (statistics, data correlation, quantification of parameters)
Some more detailed suggestions are listed below:
1. Please provide numerical data in the introduction to quantify the problem (takeaway food and beverage packaging, estimated amount of litter from those sources and primary production, COVID influence, etc.)
2. Some parts of the LCA general description can be moved from the materials and methods section to the introduction
3. Lines 126 and 130: formatting error
4. Line 143: error
5. “We double-checked the list of publications with a Google Scholar search” – does it mean that only the papers found in both databases were considered?
How is that related to: “publications were subsequently checked for references in order to search for important, relevant publications that may have been missed out in the search?” – does it mean that You added papers not included in the previous database search? Was it an arbitral decision?
6. Why is the number of papers considered so limited? For instance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/search?qs=food%20packaging%2C%20LCAs - simple question to the Science Direct database (food packaging and LCAs) provided me with a set of valuable papers not mentioned in this review?
7. Why are papers from 2022 and 2023 not included? (ending in 2021 makes this overview already not up-to-date)
8. Analyses – only mentioned descriptively or qualitatively; correlation analysis or statistics should be used
9. It would be recommended to provide a complete list of reviewed papers (in supplementary material)
10. Results summarizing the factor considered can be presented on graphs/visual maps that would facilitate reading
11. After statements such as: In eleven of the sixteen publications, in two publications, etc., one should include the proper references
12. 3.3.3 EoL: please use full names in paragraphs titles
13. The discussion is too descriptive and written in a way that is not easily accessible to the reader
All in all, I suggest a major review of this paper.
With regards,
Reviewer
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The author presented a review manuscript about the life cycle assessment of takeaway food and beverage packaging regarding consumer behavior. The topic of this manuscript is an interesting topic applying to current ever-growing environmental issues formed by COVID and Post COVID human behavior changes. And the author discusses the current literature with logic and form analysis. But the discussion and analysis lack data support. Only pointing out the limitations of current research is not convincible. With the recommendation from the author, some preliminary data and analysis should be provided in this manuscript. The manuscript should be reconsidered after major revision.
1. In the first and second paragraphs, the author introduced previous studies about takeaway food and beverage packages. But only brief information was discussed. Please include more detailed conclusions from these studies.
2. Other customer behavior studies need to be reviewed if there are no studies about takeaway food and beverage packages.
3. In Line 143, the reference or content was missing.
4. Only a few pieces of literature discussed consumer behavior, but a detailed discussion of how consumer behavior was analyzed should be discussed as a summary of the literature.
5. In the discussion and limitation section, the author compared and reviewed the consumer-related data from different literature and made a great point. But some data need to be provided to provide the author’s intention and analysis. Only pointing out the limitation could not be fully convincing.
6. Please double-check the format of the references. There are several reference format errors.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 5 Report
Dear authors! The presented work does not have scientific novelty. As a literature review, it includes too few sources. There is practically no analysis of the data on which the study is based.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Authors have incorporated the comments.
quality of the manuscript has improved.
Author Response
Thank you for your positive feedback.
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors corrected paper accordingly to suggestions received. It needs some editorial check (like below), but in my opinion is suitable for publication.
Author Response
Thank you for your positive feedback.
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors have replied to all the comments that I raised during the first review. And reasonable edits have been made. I recommend accepting the current format.
Author Response
Thank you for your positive feedback.
Reviewer 5 Report
Dear authors! You were able to qualitatively correct most of the comments.
Author Response
Thank you for your positive feedback.
