Abundant biomass waste and its potential bioconversion into high-value chemicals in Vietnam

Vietnam generates more than 60 million tonnes (Mt) of agricultural and agro-industrial residues each year, dominated by rice straw (40–50 Mt), followed by rice husk (8–10 Mt) and sugarcane bagasse (6–10 Mt), bamboo processing waste (0.75–1.25 Mt), and coffee and fruit residues. Most of this biomass is still openly burned or landfilled, causing air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions while wasting a dense reservoir of fermentable sugars. This review maps Vietnam-specific residue streams onto experimentally validated bioconversion cascades, couples technical performance with economic, life-cycle and policy data, and consolidates the result into feedstock-specific biorefinery pathways. Enzymatic hydrolysis and microbial fermentation are assessed critically, together with their documented bottlenecks – enzyme cost, slow rates, substrate recalcitrance, inhibitor formation and contamination – and the mitigations that address them, including on-site enzyme production, enzyme recycling, simultaneous saccharification and fermentation, and C5/C6 co-fermentation. Reported cascades convert rice husk, bamboo, spent coffee grounds and fruit waste into bioethanol (85–88% of theoretical), rare sugars (D-psicose, D-mannose, xylitol), platform acids (lactic, succinic) and prebiotic oligosaccharides at hydrolysis yields of 84–91%. Benchmarking against Thailand and Malaysia identifies policy, feedstock concentration and technology transfer as the decisive gaps, yielding an actionable roadmap for a circular, low-carbon bioeconomy in Vietnam.