Policy Recommendations for Reducing Food Waste: An Analysis Based on a Survey of Urban and Rural Household Food Waste in Harbin, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of different strategies for preventing and reducing food waste in Harbin, China, based on urban-rural differences. The findings are significant and the proposed recommendations are feasible and effective. However, there are several issues that need to be addressed:
(1) The paper needs to consider whether urban and rural residents' dietary habits will return to those before COVID-19 or continue to maintain current patterns.
(2) In part 2.2.1, the sample size of the urban areas about (54.95%) should be adjusted to make it closer to the urbanization rate (55.8%).
(3) In line 509, the reason why rewards are more effective in promoting garbage sorting behavior in urban areas and why both rewards and punishments are equally important for rural areas needs further explanation.
(4) The format of some figures needs to be improved, such as reducing the crowding of Figure 1 and ensuring the completeness of the coordinates in Figures 3, 4, 8, 15, 17, and 18.
(5) Additionally, there are some minor details that require attention, such as correcting the spelling of “ready-made meals” in line 350, and using “saving food” instead of “savings” in line 576. Finally, the language and format in lines 746-754 need to be improved.
Overall, the paper has potential for publication after making these major revisions.
The English language needs to be improved.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Congratulations for this article.
My suggestion is only change the word "paper" into "article" along it.
It is good.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors,
I am pleased to review the manuscript. The authors have done well in structuring their study.
The authors have clearly demonstrated the objective of the study. The research gap is concise and appropriate for the study period. The methodology used was very appropriate as the variables are justified. The literature review was thorough with clearity on the theory used with a relatively good background on analysis of urban and rural household food waste in Harbin, China. It relates to this study. The analysis was robust with well constructed findings.
Overall, the study is extensive and well written. However, I do have some suggestion to improve overall paper. Hence, I believe that this study can be considered for publication provided the authors are ready to revise their manuscript as per the major comments provided below:
· * Study objectives should be mentioned at the end of introduction section as concluding story.
· * I would recommend you to broaden the literature review (1) and also make the positioning of the paper clearer already at the introduction. Authors may consider some recent studies of to support the study hypothesis.
· * Please clarify the methodology part and data collection technique.
· * For research transparency, please add as an annex the survey on the basis of which the investigation was carried out?
· * Pleas also make the positioning of the paper clearer already at the final remarks (5). Moreover, I am missing more answers to “so what questions” and implications.
· * English language and style are minor spell check required.
Dear Authors,
I am pleased to review the manuscript. The authors have done well in structuring their study.
The authors have clearly demonstrated the objective of the study. The research gap is concise and appropriate for the study period. The methodology used was very appropriate as the variables are justified. The literature review was thorough with clearity on the theory used with a relatively good background on analysis of urban and rural household food waste in Harbin, China. It relates to this study. The analysis was robust with well constructed findings.
Overall, the study is extensive and well written. However, I do have some suggestion to improve overall paper. Hence, I believe that this study can be considered for publication provided the authors are ready to revise their manuscript as per the major comments provided below:
· * Study objectives should be mentioned at the end of introduction section as concluding story.
· * I would recommend you to broaden the literature review (1) and also make the positioning of the paper clearer already at the introduction. Authors may consider some recent studies of to support the study hypothesis.
· * Please clarify the methodology part and data collection technique.
· * For research transparency, please add as an annex the survey on the basis of which the investigation was carried out?
· * Pleas also make the positioning of the paper clearer already at the final remarks (5). Moreover, I am missing more answers to “so what questions” and implications.
· * English language and style are minor spell check required.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper examines the household food waste which is well explained in the introduction section. The topic is relevant to the journal and novel. I congratulate the author/s for identifying the interesting research gap that express the differences in food waste between rural and urban areas.
Although the topic, food waste, has been investigated widely in the relevant literature, this study extends our knowledge by comparing rural and urban areas. The research gap was identified by the authors and seems significant. However, some recent and important studies were not referred such as Schanes et al (2018), Ozkaya et al (2021), Nakamura et al. (2022), Withanage et al. (2021), Li et al. (2021), Ilakovac et al. (2020)
I recommend to improve literature review (Haas et al., 2022; Hanson et al. 2022; etc. ) by discussing the prevention methods and techniques for food waste, using new technologies such as mobile apps for supporting end consumer to reduce food waste, and information campaigns.
Research has focused both secondary and primary data. Although the methodology seems appropriate, some revisions are needed. First, I recommend to test the significance of differences between consumers living in urban and rural areas by using comparison analyses such as t-tests and ANOVA. For example, p.12 l.347. Authors stated that “Regarding eating frequency, rural residents cook at home (including ingredient de- 347 livery) at a frequency of 8.05 times/week, much higher than the frequency of 6.91 348 times/week for urban residents.” Does this difference statistically significant or not? Similarly, providing statistical analyses for differences among age groups considering eating habits would be grateful.
Since the main purpose of the study is to compare the consumers living in urban and rural areas, statistical comparison of these two groups will be useful in all data.
I would recommend discussing your results in more detail. Please justify your assertion “The level of education of urban residents in Harbin is higher than that of rural residents, and the amount of food waste is much higher than that of rural residents. This indicates that although urban residents have a higher level of education, their awareness of reducing food waste is still insufficient, and they have not developed the habit of saving food.” How does the level of education directly related with awareness level of consumers. Do you have any data about the level of education on reducing food waste for these groups of consumers? On the other hand, it is doubtful that a high level of awareness will guarantee this kind of behavior. Even if the awareness level of consumers is high, this level of awareness may not be reflected in their food waste behavior. The study is not based on any findings related to this. Therefore, it would be useful to discuss the findings more comprehensively in the discussion section.
Similarly, it would be great to provide more specific suggestions for companies to support raising awareness, of consumers, changing consumer behavior and reducing household food waste. Also, the theoretical contribution of the paper should be improved.
Tables and figures are adequate and informative. However, Fig. 3 should be revisited to provide all time intervals.
Please harmonize the concepts. For example, please choose the concept “eating behavior” in Table 3 or eating habit in the following sentence. I recommend using the concept “eating preference” for eating out, ready-made meal, etc. options rather than eating behavior or eating habit. Also, please correct typos such as “ready-made meal” to “ready-made meals”.
References
Schanes, K., Dobernig, K., & Gözet, B. (2018). Food waste matters-A systematic review of household food waste practices and their policy implications. Journal of Cleaner Production, 182, 978-991.
Tekinbaş Özkaya, F., Durak, M. G., Doğan, O., Bulut, Z. A., & Haas, R. (2021). Sustainable consumption of food: Framing the concept through Turkish expert opinions. Sustainability, 13(7), 3946.
Nakamura, K., Kojima, D., & Ando, M. (2022). What reduces household food waste in Japan? Nation-Wide and region-specific contributing factors in urban and rural areas. Sustainability, 14(6), 3174.
Withanage, S. V., Dias, G. M., & Habib, K. (2021). Review of household food waste quantification methods: Focus on composition analysis. Journal of Cleaner Production, 279,123722.
Li, Y., Wang, L. E., Liu, G., & Cheng, S. (2021). Rural household food waste characteristics and driving factors in China. Resources, Conservations and Recycling, 164, 105209.
Ilakovac, B., Voca, N., Pezo, L., & Cerjak, M. (2020). Quantification and determination of household food waste and its relation to sociodemographic characteristics in Croatia. Waste Management, 102, 231-240.
Haas, R., Aşan, H., Doğan, O., Michalek, C. R., Karaca Akkan, Ö., & Bulut, Z. A. (2022). Designing and Implementing the MySusCof App—A Mobile App to Support Food Waste Reduction. Foods, 11(15), 2222.
Hanson, V.; Ahmadi, L. Mobile applications to reduce food waste within Canada: A review. Can. Geogr. Le Géographe Can. 2022, 62, 402–411.
Although I am not qualified to assess the quality of English in this paper due to the fact that I am not and native speaker, I recommend some minor changes.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 5 Report
Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to review this article. The article is interesting but contains too many shortcomings in its current form. The author needs to work rigorously before this article can be published in this reputable journal.
1. Please also incorporate the methodology part in the abstract section.
2. Please mention the sampling technique in the abstract section.
3. Please also include some figures from your study findings in your abstract.
4. Please remove common keywords like "household" and also remove "FW".
5. Lines 117–133 should be removed from the introduction part and placed somewhere in the "materials and methods" section.
6. Please add a new section of review literature to your revision to provide an overview of previous studies and also identify your research gap on the basis of this literature. Write your hypotheses in a proper way that you want to test in this study as well. Remove the literature part from the introduction section and include it in a new section. Following articles might help you in this regard
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912945
https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010123
7. Line 162: Confidence interval = 5.37? Please check and revise.
8. Please cite the scientist whose formula was used to calculate this sample size.
9. Equation 1 should be rewritten in a proper way.
10. Do you think that a sample size of 333 is enough for 9.432 million people? How would you justify this? For this kind of study, the sample size should have been much greater.
11. Line 172: The authors mentioned that they used stratified sampling, but the procedure written in the manuscript does not show this. Please look at it and revise accordingly. First, understand what stratified sampling is. Revise your whole sampling method.
12. From where did you get the phone numbers of the respondents? Please mention your sampling procedure clearly.
13. Table 1: Remove Chinese from Table 1.
14. How did you validate your questionnaire?
15. Please remove all unnecessary information from the whole result section and limit it to your results only. Currently, the result section contains too much unnecessary information.
16. I could not see any econometric model in the study. Please use some econometric models to make it valuable and rigorous from a scientific point of view.
17. The discussion section should be in paragraph form, and headings should be removed.
18. In the discussion section, please focus on your study objective and discuss your important findings only. For example, Section 4.1 as a whole could be removed from the manuscript.
19. A recommendation should be part of the conclusion, and it could be named "Conclusion and Policy Recommendations".
20. The title should also be changed to truly represent the study.
Best of Luck
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
Congratulations on a very interesting work done.
I want to thank the authors for taking the effort and revised the manuscript. It is admirable that the authors try to add to the research paper. The paper has approved a lot, and presents the results now more interestingly. I am agree with the current form of the article.
Dear authors,
Congratulations on a very interesting work done.
I want to thank the authors for taking the effort and revised the manuscript. It is admirable that the authors try to add to the research paper. The paper has approved a lot, and presents the results now more interestingly. I am agree with the current form of the article.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Thank you for your great efford to improve your paper and responses. I only recommend to review some of recent studies and cite them to improve your literature review such as;
Tekinbas Ozkaya, F., Durak, M. G., Dogan, O., Bulut, Z. A., & Haas, R. (2021). Sustainable consumption of food: Framing the concept through Turkish expert opinions. Sustainability, 13(7), 3946.
Withanage, S. V., Dias, G. M., & Habib, K. (2021). Review of household food waste quantification methods: Focus on composition analysis. Journal of Cleaner Production, 279,123722.
Li, Y., Wang, L. E., Liu, G., & Cheng, S. (2021). Rural household food waste characteristics and driving factors in China. Resources, Conservations and Recycling, 164, 105209.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 5 Report
The authors have made efforts to address most of my comments, but I suggest they consider the following points before accepting this paper:
The authors should find the researcher or scientist whose formula they have used and cite it in the manuscript to give due credit as well as facilitate the review process. The authors mentioned in their response to "points 7 and 8" of my previous comments that 5.37 is a confidence interval, but I do not think so. It could be a standard error or error term, from my point of view. Knowing whose formula the authors have used is necessary to validate this. The authors must know that sample size determination and selecting a representative sample are key for studies involving primary data.
As the authors have used some new econometric statistics, their results should also be part of the abstract section.
The response to "Point 14: How did you validate your questionnaire?" could be made part of the manuscript. It could be made part of the "2.2.2 Content of Questionnaire" section.
Lines 631-648: Please remove Chinese language from this section and also from other parts of the manuscript.
Line 372: "The higher the education level, the higher the frequency of food waste." Is something missing in this sentence?
Please add coefficients and their standard errors as well to Table 4. Do not keep more than three digits after the dot.
The authors should include the odd ratio formula in the materials and methods section and interpret your odd ratio and other logit model results in the correct way.
Line 825: I would suggest using the word "study or research" instead of "article" throughout the manuscript.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 5 Report
Satisfied with improvements and paper can be acceptable in current form.
