The impact of municipal solid waste sorting policy on air pollution: Evidence from Shanghai, China

Yaopei Wang; Qingling Shi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0277035

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 4, 2022
30 Aug 2022 Decision Letter - Ghaffar Ali, Editor PONE-D-22-13042The Impact of Municipal solid waste sorting policy on Air Pollution: Evidence from Shanghai, ChinaPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Wang, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 14 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This paper looks like a report rather a scientific paper. Authors should have consulted authors' guidelines carefully before submission. Another issue lies with novelty, no clear hypothesis or research questions to test. Many subsections are unorthodox. I do not know why need to add such headings rather follow a standard pattern. Positive externalities are given, how about negative? Revise Figure 3 for accuracy and better map/location/resolution, etc. And few other issues such as report style write up and settings. Please revise all carefully and then submit. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. 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Revision 1
14 Sep 2022 Author Response Response to Editor Dear Associate Professor Ghaffar Ali Thank you very much for giving us the chance to revise and resubmit the manuscript. We truly appreciate the valuable comments and suggestions that have helped substantially improve the quality of the paper. Based on the submission guidelines and map copyright guidelines you sent to us, we carefully changed the style form of this manuscript to meet the journal requirements: 1. Moved the content of footnotes into the main text and deleted footnotes; 2. Changed the Reference list into “Vancouver” style; 3. Made the line spacing, abbreviations as well as equations meet the style requirments, etc. We also rebuilt Fig 3 by using the map and data from OpenStreetMap site that are compatible with CC BY licensing and added the map statement in Acknowledge. The new Fig 3 is as follows: Note: Base map and data from OpenStreetMap and OpenStreetMap Foundation, original copyright: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright. The stars mark the locations of air monitoring stations, and the dots mark the locations of domestic waste incineration plants in Shanghai. We have uploaded figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. Following the Reviewer’s comments, we have made the following major revisions to the paper. Note that we would not like to present some minor revisions to minimize the length of the letter. 1. “This paper looks like a report rather a scientific paper. Authors should have consulted authors' guidelines carefully before submission.“ We have carefully changed the style form of this manuscript to meet the journal requirements. We have reorganized the structure of this manuscript and rewritten the introduction section by directly stating our research question and addressing how our work contributes to the literature. Specifically, the revised chapter structure is: 1.Introduction 2.Materials and Methods 2.1 Policy Background and Research Hypotheses 2.2 Data Source and Description 2.3 Empirical Strategy 3.Results 3.1 Baseline Findings 3.2 Parallel Trend Test 3.3 Robustness Tests 3.4 Spillover Effect 4.Discussion 5. Conclusions Acknowledgments References 2. “Another issue lies with novelty, no clear hypothesis or research questions to test.” This comment is very enlightening. We have improved the manuscript in two ways. First, in the Introduction section, we directly state our research question after providing background. Then, we address how our work contributes to the literature. Second, we reorganized the structure of this manuscript, adding a subsection: 2.1 Policy Background and Research Hypotheses to clearly propose the three research hypotheses in this study. Specifically, the research questions are: Therefore, in this study, we focus on the questions of whether the MSW sorting policy in Shanghai significantly improves urban air quality and how large the influence will be. The three research hypotheses are: H1: The MSW sorting policy in Shanghai will reduce the air pollutants generated by waste incineration plants and significantly improve the air quality in Shanghai. H2: The degree of influence on air quality will be affected by the distances to waste incineration plants. The closer to waste incineration plants, the larger the influence will be. H3: There will be a positive spillover effect on the air quality in adjacent cities. 3.“Many subsections are unorthodox. I do not know why need to add such headings rather follow a standard pattern.“ We have reorganized the structure of this manuscript and made each heading the same as the requirements of the Manuscript Organization in journal guidelines. Specifically, the main modifications include: Changed the “2. Policy Background” into a subsection in 2.Materials and Methods “2.1 Policy Background and Research Hypotheses”; Changed the “4.2 Common Trend Test” into “Parallel Trend Test”; Changed the “6. Conclusion and Policy Implications” into “5. Conclusions” 4.“Positive externalities are given, how about negative?“ We have added a new paragraph in the Discussion section to address the immature aspects of the MSW sorting policy in Shanghai, which has caused inconvenience to residents. Finally, there are still many immature aspects of the MSW sorting policy in Shanghai, which has caused inconvenience to residents. Wu et al. (2021) [34] used a text mining technique to uncover attitudes from the Chinese public toward MSW sorting policies. They find that although a large proportion of the Chinese public has a positive attitude toward the MSW sorting policy, the proportion of people with negative emotions reached nearly half. Most negative emotions were toward fines, MSW sorting rules, fees, timing of throwing waste, and irregular recycling procedures. Our parallel trend test also shows that the impact of the MSW sorting policy seems to become weaker in the long term. Therefore, to maintain the sustainability of MSW sorting behaviors, the government needs to further improve efficiency and reduce residents' time costs. 5.“Revise Figure 3 for accuracy and better map/location/resolution, etc. In addition, few other issues such as report style write up and settings.“ We have rebuilt Fig 3 as above. We also avoided the writing style of the report by removing some unnecessary statistics listed in the Introduction section, removing the policy implications in the Conclusion section and using an editing tool to improve the write up of this manuscript. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Editor.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277035.r002
19 Oct 2022 Decision Letter - Ghaffar Ali, Editor The Impact of Municipal solid waste sorting policy on Air Pollution: Evidence from Shanghai, China PONE-D-22-13042R1 Dear Dr. Wang, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Ghaffar Ali, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Authors have made changes in the light of comments and suggestions given earlier. I am satisfied with the revision. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277035.r003
Formally Accepted
24 Oct 2022 Acceptance Letter - Ghaffar Ali, Editor PONE-D-22-13042R1 The Impact of Municipal solid waste sorting policy on Air Pollution: Evidence from Shanghai, China Dear Dr. Wang: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Prof. Ghaffar Ali Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277035.r004

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