The Mission

Europe throws away 12.6 million tonnes of textiles every year. As of January 2025, every EU member state must collect them separately. By 2028, every member state must run a full EPR scheme that tracks what those textiles are made of. The problem: the only technology that can identify fibre composition costs €100,000+ and fills half a warehouse. The 300,000 collection points and small sorting centres that actually handle Europe's textiles have nothing. SortSight is building a scan box that fits on a table, costs under €1,500, and tells you exactly what a garment is made of in under one second. No cloud. No subscription. No lab. Just point, scan, sort.

The Challenge

Today, textile sorting is guesswork. Workers can tell cotton from denim by touch, but they cannot distinguish polyester from nylon or detect a 60/40 blend. They rely on care labels which independent research on 10,000+ garments found to be inaccurate 41% of the time. The cost of this blindness is measurable: unsorted mixed bales sell for €0.12/kg; correctly identified single-fibre streams sell for €0.25/kg or more. Across just six European countries, this gap destroys €74 million per year in recoverable value. Meanwhile, the EU's new EPR rules will require composition reporting that is physically impossible without fibre-level identification. Sorting centres face a choice: invest six figures in industrial equipment, or fail compliance. Most cannot afford either.

The solution

A compact scan box. An operator places a garment inside. A camera classifies type, condition, and colour. A near-infrared sensor reads the fibre composition through the fabric itself: no label, no sample prep, no waiting. An onboard edge processor with a dedicated AI accelerator returns results in under one second, fully offline, using under 10 watts. Production cost: under €1,500. That is 50 to 100 times cheaper than industrial NIR sorting lines. SortSight turns every blind collection point into an intelligent sorting node and gives Europe's textile infrastructure the eyes it needs to meet the rules it just wrote.