Assessment of Heavy Metal Distribution and Health Risk of Vegetable Crops Grown on Soils Amended with Municipal Solid Waste Compost for Sustainable Urban Agriculture
, Rajesh Kumar Sharma 2, Abhishek Chauhan 3, Anuj Ranjan 4, Vishnu D. Rajput 4, Tatiana Minkina 4, Saglara S. Mandzhieva 5, Usha Mina 6, Shikha Wadhwa 7, Prakash Bobde 8 and Ashutosh Tripathi 1,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
General comment:
The manuscript deals with the assessment of the utilization of municipal solid waste compost to amend the soil and its impact on the growth and yield of brinjal, tomato and okra. The effect of compost ratio was considered. The study also investigated the uptake of heavy metals by plants and their risk to human consumption.
The manuscript is suitable to be published in this journal; however, some points should be addressed before publication.
Some minor language mistakes are present that should anyway be corrected.
1. Introduction
Please, improve the literature overview on risk assessment. Please, consider the following papers:
· Risk analysis for a contaminated site in north of Naples (Italy) (2015) Chemical Engineering Transactions, 43, pp. 1927 - 1932.
· Evaluation and environmental risk assessment of heavy metals in the soil released from e-waste management activities in Lahore, Pakistan (2023) Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 195 (1), art. no. 89.
· Ecological risk and health risk analysis of soil potentially toxic elements from oil production plants in central China (2022) Scientific Reports, 12 (1), art. no. 17077.
2. Materials and Methods
Please, specify if pH was kept constant or it was monitored during the tests.
Please, clarify the reliability of the heavy metal bioaccumulation potential assessment.
3. Results
Please, include the physicochemical characteristics of compost and compare them with international standards.
Please, compare the contents of heavy metals in soil with international standards.
Please, clarify if the contents of heavy metals in soli was assessed after the bioaccumulation and if the comparison with international standards was carried out.
Please, clarify if the bioavailability of heavy metals was considered.
Please, clarify if the human health risk was assessed by considering international standards: in other word it is possible to eat that vegetables?
4. Discussion
Please, improve comparison between your findings and literature data, in terms of removal efficiency and health risk.
Please, clarify if the pH was monitored and the effect of the pH variation was taken into consideration.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The study concerns the still current issue of the influence of heavy metals on the quality of cultivated plants. In this case, the health risk that may occur when fertilizing the soils of municipal solid waste compost was assessed. The work contains a lot of data contained in the extensive Result chapter. The authors introduced subsections to facilitate the receipt of the work. However, this chapter is still very difficult to read. This chapter should be thoroughly redrafted and shortened. Besides, this chapter includes literature citations and the authors introduced elements of the discussion. This cannot be the case because here we have the results chapter, not results and discussion. A separate discussion chapter is included and it is very underdeveloped. Just like the discussion chapter, the material and methods chapter contains a number of omissions and requires thorough additions. Chapter conclusions also need to be improved. In the introduction, the research goals should be clearly defined and the discussions and conclusions should be written accordingly.
One should also consider the legitimacy of citing literature older than 10 years and I am not thinking about literature related to the analytical methods here. The paper has as many as 80 literature items, and 1/3 of them are old literature. So it won't be too bad if the old items are removed.
Detailed comments are made directly in the manuscript.
The figure numbers are wrong. Please verify and enter them correctly. The quality of the figures should be improved.
The paper may be an interesting example of research, but only after a thorough improvement with the comments included.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The work has been edited and supplemented according to the guidelines. The quality has improved significantly and in its current form it can be recommended for publication.
