Assignment 2:1 Peer Review of Research Proposal

To: Shuge Luo, Author

From, Enguang Shi,

Reviewer Date: October 20, 2020

Subject: Review of Your Report Proposal

Thank you for working with me on this peer review project. I’ve reviewed your proposal for targeting waste management at Circular Economy Accelerator Programme project for Zero Waste Scotland. You have done a great job in writing a clear and well-organized formal proposal. By the way, the topic is very new and interesting to me. Here are a few comments and suggestions I offer:

First Impressions:

This proposal is well-organized with excellent English writing skills. Almost no grammar or typo errors can be found. Also, the proposal fully considers the intended audience and uses a professional tone.

Organization:

This proposal is logically well-organized. The format used is formal. The well-titled headings and bullet points show systematization in this proposal as well.

Introduction:

The research proposal begins with a detailed and clear background description of Zero Waste Scotland and clarifies the service purpose of a specific branch program. Two suggestions:

• Adding the causes of the problem into the introduction section can better connect with the rest of the research proposal.

• Because the section describes the objective information of a certain organization, it will be better to add some citations to improve credibility.

Statement of Problem

The first two paragraphs of this section state that the current way of waste disposal is not ideal and the local waste management system is tried to improve. The last paragraph clarifies that the problem is the imperfection of the waste management system. The problem is well identified and explained. However, the first two paragraphs could be regarded as additional background information. Two suggestions are as follows:

• Moving the first two paragraphs into the introduction section so that it will make the content of this section mainly focus on what the problem is.

• Providing a citation to improve the credibility of the fact that “primary goods are unlikely to be displaced by recycled goods”.

Proposed Solution:

There are two solutions clearly stated in this section. One is helping the public to identify the misconception about recycling and the other one is to encourage reusing instead of recycling. These solutions seem feasible (see more comment on this below).

• It would be helpful to expand on the concrete and practical approaches according to these solutions mentioned above. For example, the ways of encouraging local people to reuse goods such as establishing a system of rewards and punishment could be described.

Scope:

The questions mentioned in this section seem thoughtful. However, there is one suggestion:

• Since the questions are required to mainly focus on the feasibility of solutions, some other relative questions could be added such as what is the percentage of people who can understand or accept the idea of reusing goods.

Methods:

This section claims that the primary data source is from surveys designed for students. This seems a reliable primary data source. Also, the graphs of survey samples are clearly demonstrated. Two suggestions:

• Adding secondary data sources such as relevant publications could improve the data diversity and could be helpful to actually carry out the solution.

• Removing the first graph because of the duplication.

• Adding a title to the graph.

Grammar and Technical Typos:

Please refer to the following in regards to minor grammatical errors:

Introduction:

• Add “a” before the word “few” in “There are few branch programs focus on different areas of work”

Scope:

• Add “a” before the word “few” in “there are few questions needed to be included”

• Replace “do” with “to” in “but how do balance the increasing consumption with the idea of Zero Waste”

• Use a question mark at the end of “but how do balance the increasing consumption with the idea of Zero Waste”

Revisions:

In general, this is a well-organized proposal using excellent English writing skills. Great job! However, in terms of the contents of this proposal, there are some minor problems and I have given my humble opinion. For the statement of the problem, it should be more focusing on the problem itself, not the background information. For the solution part, it is suggested to expand more on the practical side of the solution. As for the scope section, it shows some deep thoughtfulness into the solution. The suggestion is to add some questions about the feasibility of the solution. When it comes to the method part, more data sources are recommended to be added, as well as noticing the understandability of the graph.