Fashion waste crisis – sorted!

Sorting out fabrics for recyling just might get faster with AI powered scanners built by a small start-up.

UK startup Matoha has completed the first phase of a £1.5m Seed funding round to expand its AI-powered textile scanners, which identify fabric composition in under a second.

The investment will help Matoha unlock circularity in fashion and materials supply chains by tackling the key bottleneck in recycling: fibre identification.

Currently, about 15kg of textile waste is generated per person annually in Europe but less than 1% of that is fibre-to-fibre recycled.

One of the biggest challenges is sorting textiles by material type, a crucial step, since recycling plants require specific fibres for processing.

Matoha’s handheld and desktop scanners, built in the UK, provide rapid, accurate results and require minimal training.

This enables businesses to scale up sorting without heavy infrastructure or lab analysis. The tools are already helping fashion brands and recycling facilities process end-of-life textiles more efficiently.