Closure to the discussion of “Drained shear behaviour of recycled construction and demolition waste mixed with natural aggregates and their optimal mix proportion”

This closure addresses the discussion raised by Cherif Taiba et al. [1] on the findings reported in the article [2]. Of the four matters raised, three pertain to the declared scope of the study and future research directions that were explicitly identified within the article. For these matters, this closure refers to relevant sections of the article where the corresponding methods and results are developed. The fourth matter concerns the treatment of peak apparent cohesion in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which the discussion holds to have skewed the weighting in favour of the mixture identified as optimal. While the underlying premise is stated in the article itself, the resulting conclusion is not supported by the ranking data. To clarify this point, the rankings are revisited here, together with scores recalculated with the criterion removed. The results confirm that the optimal blend exhibits the lowest apparent cohesion among the materials tested, hence excluding this criterion strengthens, rather than weakens, its ranking position.