Re-use of laboratory utensils reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs

Martin Farley; Benoit P. Nicolet

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0283697

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 21, 2022
8 Nov 2022 Decision Letter - Atif Jahanger, Editor PONE-D-22-26188Re-use of labware reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs in laboratoriesPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Farley, 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 Dec 23 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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We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. 3. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: 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). 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. 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: The authors have attempted to test the effect of a concept related to circular economy, which is truly a time-demanding topic. The overall work is good. However, I feel that there is still some room to improve the paper before it can be published. My suggestions are attached to a separate file. Reviewer #2: The study titled "Re-use of labware reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs in laboratories" First, the title should be slightly improved. The abtract must be more concrete to explicitly mention the real contribution of the paper. A slight improvement in the information flow will add worth to the manuscript. Lastly, a suggested reading from other disciplines to make literature citation more strong and diverse; https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20320-z ****** 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. 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 Reviewer #2: Yes: Ashar Awan ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Review Report Plos One_PONE-D-22-26188.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283697.r001
Revision 1
23 Jan 2023 Author Response Reviewers' comments: Reviewer #1: The authors have attempted to test the effect of a concept related to circular economy, which is truly a time-demanding topic. The overall work is good. However, I feel that there is still some room to improve the paper before it can be published. My suggestions are attached to a separate file. (Authors pasted below the separate file provided by the reviewer, for convenience) Abstract: 1. The abstract is well-written, clarifying the reasons of this study and highlighting the main findings. Thank you. Introduction 1. Please include page numbers and/or line numbers. Thank you, we have now added page numbers to the manuscript (as also required for manuscript submission). 2. The background information is insufficient and needs to be elaborated. The authors should be able to build up a concrete and coherent relationship between the circular economy of labware use, its effect on CO2 emissions and other environmental benefits along with the economic gains of the reuse. And then the research gaps need to unfolded step by step. Please include one or two paragraphs detailing this information. We thank the reviewer for asking more detailed and coherent introduction. We have now entirely re-writen the introduction to: 1) better highlight the knowledge gap and how we address it in this study; 2) better introduce our work in the context of the circular economy; 3) highlight the clear difference of the laboratory resource and waste management compared to classical household setting (e.g. the use of biohazard material prevents the recycling of material in many countries). 3. The novelty statement is missing and the claimed novelties have been posted without any detailed literature review. I suggest writing the originalities of this article point-by-point accounting the recent progress in the literature. This is section where the authors need to show how they stand out from other existing papers in the scholarship. We thank the reviewer for asking for clarification of the novelty aspect of our work. Specifically, as mentioned in our answer to comment #2 of the reviewer, we have re-written the introduction to better highlight the problematic addressed and the novelty of our work. In addition, we would like to emphasize that to our knowledge there are no studies regarding the quantification of CO2e footprint of labware in the context of the laboratory environment (again, as indicated in the new introduction, is very different from the household environment due to biohazardous materials). 4. I do not see any separate literature review section. Also, the introduction section does not dive deep into the existing literature. We thank the reviewer for this comment. As mentioned in our answer to the comment #3 of the reviewer, there is to our best knowledge no prior literature on this subject. This prevents us from providing any depth in a field which is understudied. 5. Please number the sections and sub-sections accordingly. We thank the reviewer for this comment. However, we refrain from numbering our sections due to journal’s formatting guidelines. Nonetheless, we now included a level 1 and 2 heading style, as per journal guideline, to clarify the sectioning structure of our article. Methods 1. The method section looks very abstract. It would be great if the authors could include a pictorial flowchart detailing the methodological framework used in this paper. We thank the reviewer for this nice suggestion. We now include a flow-chart to graphically detail the methodology used in this paper. Empirical Analysis and Conclusion The results and discussion sections are well-written. However, the conclusion and policy implications are missing. Please include these and specify the limitations of this study. Along with that suggest for the future studies. We thank the reviewer for this comment. The new version of our discussion addresses the concerns of the reviewer. We believe that we highlight the policy implication, provided further context into future laboratory design, and provided suggestions for future studies to improve upon our own. Reviewer #2: The study titled "Re-use of labware reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs in laboratories" First, the title should be slightly improved. The abtract must be more concrete to explicitly mention the real contribution of the paper. A slight improvement in the information flow will add worth to the manuscript. Lastly, a suggested reading from other disciplines to make literature citation more strong and diverse; https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20320-z We thank Dr. Ashar Awan for the suggestions to improve our manuscript. The title was changed to “Re-use of laboratory utensils reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs” to better reflect the findings of our paper. We now entirely rearranged the introduction to highlight the paper’s problematic, and the knowledge gap which we address. The information flow was also reworked. We now implement the suggestion of reviewer #1 to include a flow chart to help the reader understand our study design and workflow (see new Fig S1). Finally, we thank the reviewer for the reading suggestion. It is a nice article. To make the citation more diverse, we also included several new citations (see references list). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283697.r002
14 Mar 2023 Decision Letter - Atif Jahanger, Editor Re-use of laboratory utensils reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs PONE-D-22-26188R1 Dear Dr. Farley, 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, Atif Jahanger, Ph.D 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 Reviewer #2: (No Response) ******** 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 Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 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 Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 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 Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 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: The authors have addressed all of my comments. This version reads well and can be accepted for publication. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 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 Reviewer #2: Yes: ashar awan ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283697.r003
Formally Accepted
21 Mar 2023 Acceptance Letter - Atif Jahanger, Editor PONE-D-22-26188R1 Re-use of laboratory utensils reduces CO2 equivalent footprint and running costs Dear Dr. Farley: 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 Dr. Atif Jahanger Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283697.r004

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