Recycling of WEEE Plastics Waste in Mortar: The Effects on Mechanical Properties
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is interesting; however, the authors should provide the following info:
- what is the average composition of the polymer waste fraction? Do you have any relevant data on this?
- the procedure for measuring the granulometric distribution, mechanical properties and so on must be described in the “Materials and methods” section
Author Response
please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents a new results related to the mechanical properties of recycling WEEE plastics waste in mortar. The paper could be improved according to the comments in the attached file.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to read this work. I thought your porosity modeling approach was novel, and a good contribution. I offer the following suggestions for your consideration.
The introduction and background is fairly weak and should be expanded. The authors cite other studies, but do not provide key findings from these studies to which the current work can be compared. page 2, lines 43-52 should certainly be expanded to include at least some strength data, modulus of elasticity data, and density data to facilitate comparison to the current work.
Overall, this manuscript would benefit from the services of an English editor. There are a few word choices and grammatical inconsistencies that may distract the reader from the technical merit of this paper.
p2, line 44 - need space before citation
p2, line 63 - "used for preparation of the mortars."
p3, line 85 - use "performed" instead of "realized"
p3, line 102 - replace superior with upper
Figure 1: theoretical is spelled incorrectly
p5, line 151 - "differs largely from that of the natural aggregates."
p5, lines 155-157 - some description of surface preparation prior to microscopic analysis should be provided here. We have extensive experience preparing polished specimens for petrographic analysis in our lab, and have many times seen paste erode along the interface between aggregate-paste when the paste is weak, the ITZ is weak, or issues exist during polishing. Please describe your sample sawcutting and polishing processes, with an emphasis on how you ensured your polishing process did not exacerbate any weak areas or voids alongside plastic aggregates. It is possible that some of the void space you're seeing is being introduced by the polishing process.
p5, line 166-168 - can you speculate on why the plastic aggregates tended to clump together and accrue large voids between them. Surface charge? Poor dispersion during mixing? Please offer some thoughts here.
p6, line 193 - "since cement paste possesses"
p6, line 202 - remarkably, not remarkable
figure 4: could you add the R2 values to the legends for these plots? May be easier to compare than using the table. Or could be provided on the plots in addition to the summary table.
p8, line 228 - "only a fraction, f, of the plastic"
p8, line 239, same note as above regarding use of commas around f in the sentence.
table 3: this table needs units on each of the columns
p9, line 261-262 - here is where you can refer back to an improved introduction/background. We don't know what sizes were used in the previous studies because you didn't provide that information in the background.
page 9, lines 265 - after this discussion, it would be very helpful to compare your values for strength, modulus, etc. to some published values in the literature (added to an improved introduction/background).
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors responded to all comments, I recommend to accept the paper for publication
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for the positive opinion
