The presence of foreign matter in cotton seriously affects the cotton grade and thus the price per bale paid by the spinner to the grower, the efficiency of the spinning and ginning operations, and the quality of the final woven product. Rapid identification of the nature of the extraneous matter iin cotton at each stage of cleaning and processing is necessary to permit actions to eliminate or reduce its presence. Although several instruments are being successfully employed for the measurement of contamination in cotton fibers based on particle size/weight, no commercial instrument is capable of accurate qualitative identification of contaminants. To this end, ATR/FT-IR spectra of retrieved foreign matter were collected and subsequently rapidly matched to an authentic component spectrum in a spectral database. The database includes contaminants typically classified as “trash”: cotton plant parts (hull, shale, seed-coat fragments, bract, cacyx, leaf, bark, sticks and stems) and grass plant parts (leaf and stem), “foreign objects and materials”; synthetic materials (plastic bags, film, rubber, bale wrapping and strapping), organic materials (other fibers, yarns, paper, and leather) plus entomological and physiological sugars and inorganic materials (sand and rust). The spectral matching resulted in consistently high-score identification of the foreign matter based on chemical composition, irrespective of its particle size. The method is envisioned to be employed with stand-alone rugged infrared instrumentation to provide specific identification of extraneous materials in cotton as opposed to only general classification of the type by particle size or shape.