Tushita Gupta, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Refiberd

Innovating Textile Recycling with AI

What’s your current outfit made from? Most of us don’t really know, and the options for combining natural and synthetic fibers are nearly endless.

Because many of those mixed textiles are hard to recycle, they’re a sizable portion of the 186 billion pounds of fabric filling landfills each year.

For alumni Tushita Gupta (ENG 2018, 2018) and fellow Tartan on the Rise Sarika Bajaj (ENG 2018, 2019; CMU 2020), it’s a looming crisis that AI can help to mitigate.

The two CMU alumni co-founded Refiberd, a seed-stage company that has developed an AI-based technology to sort waste for textile-to-textile recycling.

“Other fields use intelligent material detection, but applying it to textiles is a huge opportunity,” says Tushita, the company’s chief technology officer. “No scaled solutions exist for textile waste detection for recycling, because it's such a hard problem.”

Tushita has long been interested in AI and its potential. While pursuing her master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering and a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at CMU, her capstone focused on intelligent trash-sorting.

Tushita’s friend from her first days at CMU, Sarika saw the potential to combine their backgrounds in machine learning, textiles, and engineering and Refiberd was born.

Refiberd’s innovation uses a hyperspectral camera combined with AI to detect fiber composition and sort textile waste for recycling. The camera identifies fibers by how they absorb or reflect light. AI processes each material’s unique signature to discern fabric composition and groups similar materials for reuse.

In 2023, Refiberd was recognized with the Global Change Award from the H&M Foundation, honoring early-stage innovations that help the fashion and textile industry protect Earth’s resources.

“We aim to have Refiberd be the solution that closes the loop for textile circularity,” she says. “I’ve always been driven by impact, and I believe it’s our responsibility to protect the resources we have.”

Story by Elizabeth Speed