We may infer the possibility of converting cotton-based waste materials to ethanol via enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation.
However, they need a pretreatment; otherwise the ethanol yield cannot be more than 26% of the theoretical yield. Pretreatment with phosphoric acid results in a great improvement in the hydrolysis of the materials, but it is far from the results of alkali pretreatment by NaOH, which results in more than 99% yield in the subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis.