Opportunities for New Biorefinery Products from Ethiopian Ginning Industry By-products: Current Status and Prospects

The global demand for textile products is rapidly increasing due to population growth, rising living standards, economic development, and fast fashion trends. Ethiopian growth and transformation plan (GTP) gives high priorities for the textile and apparel sectors to transform its agriculturally led economy to an industrial-based economy. To achieve this, the number of textile and apparel industries is rapidly expanding. However, the rapid growth in textile industry is generating mountains and mountains of by-products. In this review, possible applications of cotton stalk and cotton ginning waste in a variety of technologies and products are discussed in Ethiopian context. The finding of this study shows that Ethiopian current cotton cultivating area is about 80 000 hm2, even though the country has a potential of about 3 000 810 hm2 land for cotton cultivation. From the current cultivated area, more than 240 000 t of cotton stalk and 9240 t of cotton ginning trash have been generated as a by-product. But only a very little portion of the cotton stalk is being used as a raw fuel for household purposes and a small portion of cotton ginning trash is used for animal feed. Therefore, these underutilized lignocellulosic biomasses can be used as raw materials for producing different high-value biomaterials and thus country can perceive an economic and environmental benefit. A closer look at the structure and composition of the by-products shows that the whole part of cotton stalk and ginning waste can be used as a source of cellulose which can be exploited for conversion into a number of high-value biomaterials. Thus, conversion of the waste into valuable products can make cotton stalk and ginning by-products an attractive raw material for the production of high value bio-products.