Almost one third of the waste textiles produced from manufacturing clothing and other textile products are made of cotton. Hence, a huge amount of waste cotton is produced every year. Therefore, we aimed to develop an efficient way for conversion of cotton from waste textile into some beneficial resource in an environmentally safe manner. In this study, it was suggested a novel way to break down cotton cellulose into source of biomass glucose through a mild hypochlorite oxidation process (ca., 0.5 wt % of NaClO and 0.0125 wt % NaBr) under UV-irradiation. And, the UV light-NaBr-NaClO oxidation system was seen to induce exo-cleavage on (1 4)-glycosidic bonds in cellulose polymer. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013