Review of 'Elemental and Thermogravimetric Analysis of Plastic-Paper Composites as Refuse-derived Fuels for Energy Generation.'

I am indeed delighted by your thorough review of the paper manuscript. I have perused throught the paper and made the necessary corrections as instructed . I want to thank you for the painstaking effort you made to improve the quality of the paper.

REVIEWERS COMMENTS AND AUTHOR’S RESPONSE

Please provide full affiliation, including country of origin. Noted and corrected.

Abstract,

For clarity and scientific rigor, include the samples acronyms before providing their results samples with 25 wt%. (PL75+PA25) and so on. Noted and corrected.

Introduction

Could you provide more recent data for your waste composition in Table 1? FMEnv (2004) is nearly 20 years old information. Noted and corrected

Materials and Methods

Include caption for figures in section 2.1 and number it accordingly in a crescent order with the rest of the manuscript’s figures. Noted and corrected

Table 1 should be named Table 2. Noted and corrected

Figures in section 2.3 must also be captioned and numbered. Noted and corrected

Results and Discussions

Values in Figure 1 are not clearly distinguished and as exact figures to the second decimal number are not visible on the axis. Noted and corrected.

Would you expect a different result than plastic having the highest Carbon content? And why? Yes. Because plastic has a high carbon footprint- perhaps as high fossil fuel

Anonymous authors are not acceptable in scientific publication, refer to another study. Noted and corrected

Again sulfur content values are not visible in Figure 1 and the extremely low quantities can be questioned as instrument variability, can you provide the sensibility of the equipment used to analyse the samples and include them in Materials and Methods? Even though instrument variability could impact negatively on the outcome of the Sulphur content reading, the result of Sulphur content obtained from this study are not very different from what obtains from polymeric material as shown from literature.  

Subsections in this section should be renamed as 3.1, 3.2, etc. and not i, ii, etc. Noted and corrected

Is there any particular reason to include the stages of coal oxidation? How relevant is this information to this study on Paper/Plastic? – Not necessary, and the stages of coal oxidation has been expunged.

Can you recheck the temperatures for polymers degradation in air and inert gas, 300C and 500C respectively? – It has been rechecked and the thermal behavior are somewhat the same.

How do you relate the samples’ chemical composition to their thermal behavior? This should be better discussed in the manuscript and possibly a sentence included in conclusions and abstract section-

Specifically, the relatively high molecular weight and long polymer chain length result in entanglement, and the lack of covalent intermolecular bonds facilitates polymer chain mobility.