Cotton fibre contains various impurities, including leaf and stem pieces, insect droppings, whole or broken seeds, seed-coat fragments, etc. Some of this trash, such as leaf and stem pieces, is easy to remove, but seed-coat fragments are harder to eliminate because of the attached fibres. These contaminants may still be present at the spinning stage and result in production spoilage. CIRAD has developed Trashcam, an apparatus for detecting and quantifying seed-coat fragments, and its cotton breeding programmes now take this criterion into account.