Potential and sustainable utilization of tea waste: A review on present status and future trends

Tea is one of the most common and widely consumed beverages, taking the second position just after drinking water. Tea is popular for its outstanding health-promoting effects such as anti-inflammatory, cardiovascular preventive, anticancer, antidiabetic, anti-obesity, neuro-protective, and antioxidant activities. The global demand of tea is increasing remarkably and it will continue to grow over the next decade also. In order to meet such growing demand, the worldwide tea production is rising drastically which in turn results in the generation of enormous amounts of tea waste causing serious environmental issues. Therefore, the potential and sustainable utilization of tea waste is of high research endeavour. In this present work, the various aspects of tea waste such as its worldwide production, compositions, bioactive compounds of medicinal importance present in tea waste and the formation of different value-added materials from tea waste are comprehensively reviewed. Moreover, the emerging applications of tea waste in different fields including environmental remediation, energy generation, fabrication of polymer composites and preparation of electrical devices for the purpose of energy storage are elaborated in details. This review article will be beneficial to the researchers for acquiring an in-depth knowledge on the sustainable and versatile applications tea waste as a cost-effective and environmental-friendly source of biomass.