Swedish municipalities now carry legal responsibility for how well households sort their rubbish. Most of them have no idea whether their collection systems work.
Stockholm-based Sortrace raised roughly $800K in a round led by Almi Invest, with Antler, Gorilla Capital and angel investors participating. Founded by Rahel Surshi and Tomas Kjellstrand, the company mounts cameras on collection vehicles and analyses bin contents as they are emptied.
Computer vision identifies what is inside each bin and converts the images into structured data, tied to individual bins and routes. Councils can then see where mis-sorting is concentrated instead of guessing at citywide averages.
Surshi’s argument is that municipalities are spending heavily on information campaigns and new collection rounds without any measurement of effect. Making mis-sorting visible at every emptying lets them target the streets that actually need intervention.
In theory that lowers waste management costs, cuts the volume sent to incineration and lifts recycling rates. The company says analysis is privacy-protected, with images stored inside the EU, a detail that matters for municipal procurement in Sweden.
Several municipalities and recycling organisations already use it. The funding extends the technology beyond collection vehicles into other stages of the waste chain.
The honest question is scale. A sub-$1M round in a fragmented, procurement-heavy market takes time to convert, and each municipality buys separately with its own tender rules.
Still, waste is one of the few climate problems with a direct cost line attached, and instrumentation tends to precede regulation. Sortrace is betting data arrives before the rules get stricter.
