Overcoming Barriers for Adopting Cleaner Production: A Case Study in Brazilian Small Metal-Mechanic Companies
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is informative and the presented data and results are quite interesting. In particular, the idea of separating the "economic" and "financial" barriers was smart and noteworthy.
Here, I wish to suggest some minor revisions which hopefully can help the authors to improve their work.
Title: I suggest removing the words "cultural' and "technical" since a wide range of barriers and sub barriers are investigated.
Keywords: I may suggest adding more relevant keywords.
A General Question: Is it possible to judge about "sustainability" of a specific industrial segment through the tools you have presented in this work? If yes, how? It might be a good idea to discuss it under a separated "Discussion" outline or as a part of the "conclusion."
Finally, please check the English language and style of the whole manuscript. "Referências" should be revised to "References." Please double check the format of the paper to be matched with the requirements of the journal.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank you very much for your comments and for the opportunity for improving our work.
We have addressed your comments with care, with the purpose of making the document, more clear and relevant to our community. Concerning the comment about the title, we followed you suggestion making the title more concise. We also added two more keywords aiming to improve the good description of the work.
In what regards the suitability of the proposed method and set of analytical tools that were used to assess the importance of the barriers to adopt cleaner production practices to "judge the sustainability of a specific industrial segment" we consider the following. The proposed method has not been developed as a specific approach to a given business or manufacturing segment. Its application to the metal-mechanic companies can be viewed as an illustrative application field. Nonetheless, the way the tools are combined, offer a valid approach to support the process of identifying and mitigating barriers for cleaner production in the context of small enterprises. The methodology proposed is an actionable stepwise process that can be kicked off in contexts with limited availability of resources (e.g. financial, time...) and that for this reason can offer a good stepping stone for small companies to create awareness an initiate engagement with cleaner production objectives. This aspect was already mentioned in the Conclusion section of the paper, but probably was not sufficiently highlighted. Therefore, we assess a statement in the Conclusion section to bring forward this aspect of the contribution that our work offers.
Finally, we have thoroughly reviewed the writing, making corrections to the English language and we checked the references of the paper. We thank you again for this opportunity and we believe the manuscript has now improved its quality and readability.
Reviewer 2 Report
Article : Overcoming Cultural and Technical Barriers for adopting Cleaner Production: Case Study in Brazilian Small Metal Mechanic Companies
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This paper is based on the implementation of clean production into two Brazilian small metal mechanic companies.
The study is based mainly on two fairly simple tools (GUT matrix tool & Cause and Effect Analysis) that highlight the same barriers (Economic, Financial, Cultural and Technical).
It is difficult to understand the link between these informations obtained and the solutions proposed.
It would be interesting to know how the CP is implemented? By whom? What approach was used to identify/modify the process?
The cultural barrier is not sufficiently highlighted. What are the means used to achieve the goal?
Some errors should be fixed :
- line 170 : the text in the figure is not in English
- line 218 : I think it is a reference to table 5 (not table 6)
- line 218 : The legend of table 5 is missing
- line 238 : I think it is a reference to table 6 (not table 7)
- line 313: "Referências" must be replaced by "References"
References :
The bibliography is very correct. 24 references (out of 57) are less than 10 years old.
Few references are recent (less than 5 years old). It would perhaps be appropriate to have a recent state of the art presentation on the latest developments in the field of cleaner production.
However, there are problems with some references.
The following references are not present in the paper (but in the bibliography!):
CORRAL, C.M. (2003) (line 330)
SEBRAE. Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (2012) (line 412)
SISSINO, C.L.S.; MOREIRA, J.C. (2005)
A reference is duplicative:
SHI, H.; PENG, S. Z.; LIU, Y.; ZHONG, P. (2008) (lines 425 & 431)
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank you very much for your comments and for the opportunity that represent for improving our work.
We have addressed your comments with care, with the purpose of making the document, more clear and relevant to our community. Following your observations, we corrected the table mentions in the text, eliminating some errors, and we have also inserted the title for Table 5, that was missing due to some incorrect deleting in the process of reviewing and finishing the manuscript for submission. We also inserted a new figure now fully edited in english language. We went through the references list, reinserting the missing ones in the text when relevant and eliminating some from the main text in order to match the Reference list.
In what concern the comments about the methodology proposed in the paper we would like to highlight that the core contribution of the work is to put forward an analytical method that can be used as a valid approach to support the process of identifying and mitigating barriers for cleaner production in the context of small enterprises. The methodology proposed is an actionable stepwise process that can be kicked off in contexts with limited availability of resources (e.g. financial, time...) and that for this reason can offer a good stepping stone for small companies to create awareness an initiate engagement with cleaner production objectives. This aspect was already mentioned in the Conclusion section of the paper, but probably was not sufficiently highlighted. Therefore, we assess a statement in the Conclusion section to bring forward this aspect of the contribution that our work offers. Rather than exploring the richness of the implementation of actions to overcome the barriers to cleaner production, which is a relevant topic also but for which engineers have suitable expertise, this paper sets up to offer a concise approach to initiate change processes in small enterprises. The proposed approach can appeal to process managers, by offering an actionable assessment and overview of prominent barriers, in a manner that is transversal and involving participation from the production perspective.
Finally, we have thoroughly reviewed the writing, making corrections to the English language and we checked the references of the paper. We thank you again for this opportunity and we believe the manuscript has now improved its quality and readability.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors must improve the method used in this study. I do not think that it has enough novelty and innovations for its publication.
Moreover, more plocy implications should be added in the revised version.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We thank you very much for your comments and for the opportunity that represent for improving our work.
We have read your comments with care, with the purpose of making the document, more clear and relevant to our community. Following your observations, we went through a discussion about the policy implications of the work presented, and we inserted a paragraph with this information in the Conclusion section of the manuscript. The importance of deploying new knowledge to support change processes in small manufacturing contexts is very critical in economics such a Brazil. In the case of the adoption of cleaner production practices the effort can be substantial for small companies, and the length of time it takes to collect the returns on the investments can discourage them from initiating change. On this regard there are relevant policy implications for local authorities and industry bodies and for their role in the dissemination of information and practices and also in the provision of stimulus for the development of adequate and specific financial solutions to support technological change. We highlight these aspects now in the paper.
In what concern the comments about novelty of the contribution proposed in the paper we would like to highlight that the core contribution of the work is to put forward an analytical method that can be used as a valid approach to support the process of identifying and mitigating barriers for cleaner production in the context of small enterprises. The methodology proposed is an actionable stepwise process that can be kicked off in contexts with limited availability of resources (e.g. financial, time...) and that for this reason can offer a good stepping stone for small companies to create awareness an initiate engagement with cleaner production objectives. This aspect was already mentioned in the Conclusion section of the paper, but probably was not sufficiently highlighted. Therefore, we assess a statement in the Conclusion section to bring forward this aspect of the contribution that our work offers. Rather than exploring the richness of the implementation of actions to overcome the barriers to cleaner production, which is a relevant topic also but for which engineers have suitable expertise, this paper sets up to offer a concise approach to initiate change processes in small enterprises. The proposed approach can appeal to process managers, by offering an actionable assessment and overview of prominent barriers, in a manner that is transversal and involving participation from the production perspective.
Finally, we have thoroughly reviewed the writing, making corrections to the English language and we checked the references of the paper. We thank you again for this opportunity and we believe the manuscript has now improved its quality and readability.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors revised and improved the paper significantly after taking the previous revision suggestions. I think the authors did a good job in revising those issues.
Title and abstract are adequate to the content of the paper. And the paper is well presented.
Reviewer 3 Report
No comments and can be accepted for its publication.
