Technical Abstract: Ginned cotton lint contains foreign matter and less desirable short fiber after ginning, and lint cleaners are commonly employed to improve the overall quality of ginned lint by removing this material. Textile mills employ opening and cleaning equipment in order to further remove foreign matter and short fibers. In order to more accurately characterize and predict the performance of a cotton through ginning and textile processing the entire material flow must be analyzed including both the quantity and quality of the material removed by various machines. The typical analysis of material removed during processing is strictly a mass-balance calculation to determine the percentage of material removed, while fiber quality testing is performed on the so-called “good” material produced by the processing equipment. Several approaches were examined to characterize the waste flow in greater detail, including the percentage of lint and non-lint content in the waste stream and the quality of the lint in the waste stream to better understand fiber quality changes during fiber-machine interaction. A variety of methods were explored utilizing hand-sorting of the waste material as well as mechanical sorting of the waste material. Lint quality in the waste material was examined using AFIS (Advanced Fiber Information System) both with and without removal of the non-lint material.