The Mission

SortSight is a bench-top fibre scanner under €1,500, with no subscription, that tells small textile sorters what a garment is made of in one second, so they can sell clean fibre streams instead of guessing. The EU generates 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste a year. Since January 2025 every member state must set up separate textile collection, and from April 2028 producers must pay for collecting and sorting it. Every collected garment will have to be sorted, and recycling only works if you know the fibre. Today only large sorters with industrial machines can measure it. Our mission is to give every collection point and charity sorter that same sight, in a box that fits on a sorting table and works offline.

The Challenge

Labels lie. When Circle Economy scanned more than 10,000 discarded garments for the Dutch government in 2020, 41% of labels were wrong, and 59% for blends. Recyclers pay for pure fibre: low-value textiles earn sorters about €0.12 per kilo today, but at least €0.23 once sorted by fibre (Fashion for Good). Dutch sorters currently lose up to €0.14 on every kilo they sort. Fibre scanners exist, but they cost €2,500 to €14,000 or come with monthly subscriptions, and sorting machines cost €150,000 or more each. So charity and social-employment sorters, like the one in Sittard-Geleen, still sort by hand, by feel and by label.

The solution

SortSight is a scan box. Place a garment on it and near-infrared light reads the fibre on its surface, a camera records colour and appearance, and the answer appears in under a second, offline. Every scan is logged for producer responsibility reporting. Instead of an expensive spectrometer, we use a few infrared LEDs and one sensor, tuned to the wavelengths where fibres differ. We start with cotton, polyester, nylon and wool, with viscose as a research goal. Parts cost about €450 to €600 per unit today, falling toward €400 at volume. The €2,500 Ideation prize would buy a reference spectrometer and parts for our first two sensor heads, so we can test on real garments from Limburg sorters. Verified polyester is exactly the feedstock Reju's new recycling plant at Chemelot needs.