Industry Project 2025/2026: Aalto Global Impact (AGI)

The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.

This year, our team partnered with Aalto Global Impact (AGI) to explore the topic:

How might waste-to-value solutions improve the sustainability of the second hand textile industry in Kenya?

At first glance, textile waste may seem like a purely environmental issue. In reality, it is closely tied to livelihoods, global trade, and local infrastructure.

Nairobi River that passes through Gikomba Market

In Kenya, second-hand clothing—known as mitumba—plays a central role in everyday life, providing affordable clothing and creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, large volumes of low-quality garments cannot be resold and instead become waste. These textiles are often discarded in informal dumping sites, including the Nairobi River and areas such as the Dandora landfill.

This led us to a central question: How can textile waste be reduced without disrupting the mitumba system that so many people rely on for income and access to clothing?

Understanding the System

To better understand this challenge, we conducted a 10-day field research trip in Nairobi, Kenya, in February 2026.

During this time, we engaged with a diverse range of stakeholders across Kenya’s textile, design, and entrepreneurship ecosystem. These included academic institutions such as Kenyatta University and the University of Nairobi; impact investors including Finnfund; textile-focused organizations such as Africa Collect Textiles; local upcycling brands including Rummage Studio and OFF-CUT; businesses connected to the textile and design industry, such as Mananasi and Artisanal Gallery; policy actors including MCAK; and traders operating within the mitumba market.

Through these conversations, we began to understand how textile waste is shaped by global supply chains, informal economies, and limited waste management infrastructure.

While these discussions helped us understand the system, seeing it in practice brought a new level of clarity.

A Defining Moment

One of the most impactful moments of our research was visiting Gikomba Market, the second-largest second-hand clothing market in East Africa.

We observed vendors opening tightly packed bales of second-hand clothing—large bundles, often weighing around 45–50 kg, imported from countries in the Global North. Each bale contains a mix of garments, and sellers typically do not know what they will receive before opening it.

Once opened, vendors quickly sort through the clothing, selecting items for resale and setting aside those that cannot be sold. Within minutes, garments are categorized as either valuable or unsellable. What stood out was how quickly a single item could lose its value—not only based on the seller’s decision, but often due to the condition and quality of garments arriving in the bale in the first place.

Items that could not be sold were often discarded immediately. With limited formal waste management systems in place, unsellable textiles are handled in various ways, including informal dumping, incineration, or repurposing into lower-value uses such as filling materials. However, a portion of this waste still ends up in unmanaged environments, including areas connected to the Nairobi River.

This experience helped us better understand the scale of the issue and how closely it is tied to existing systems and daily livelihoods.

Key Insights

Our research highlighted several key insights:

• The mitumba system supports millions of livelihoods and cannot simply be removed without major economic impact

• A significant portion of waste is driven by global overproduction and the export of low-quality garments that are difficult to resell

• There is very limited infrastructure in Kenya for managing textile waste, especially at scale

• Many garments are made from blended fabrics (such as cotton-polyester), which are difficult to recycle using existing technologies

At the same time, we observed local initiatives—such as upcycling and craft-based production—that demonstrate how textile waste can be reframed as a resource rather than discarded.

From Insight to Opportunity

While many of the root causes of textile waste originate upstream—such as global overproduction and the export of low-quality garments—our team chose to focus on the end of the textile lifecycle, where some of the most immediate gaps in handling and value recovery currently exist.

We explored how unsellable textile waste—particularly blended fabrics—could be transformed into building materials, working with waste streams from Gikomba Market and textiles entering the Nairobi River.

Potential applications include:

• Affordable construction materials for housing

• More durable materials for market stalls, replacing temporary plastic and aluminum sheet structures

  
  

Rather than replacing the existing system, this approach works alongside it by capturing value from materials that currently have none.

Experimentation

One of the most rewarding parts of this project was moving beyond research and into hands-on experimentation. With the support of Aalto Inventors and guidance from Meri Lundahl, our team explored how post-consumer textile waste could be transformed into a potential building material. Using shredded textiles sourced from donation shops across Finland, we researched sustainable bio-based binders, designed and 3D-printed custom molds, and produced a series of textile-composite blocks with varying material compositions. Through iterative testing—including measuring load-bearing strength with a hydraulic press—we gained valuable insights into both the opportunities and challenges of creating circular material solutions. The process reinforced how innovation often emerges through experimentation, collaboration, and a willingness to test ideas beyond the classroom.

IMPACT GALA 2026

AGI team's booth at Impact Gala

At the IDBM Impact Gala 2026, we had the opportunity to present our concept and share insights from our research with guests and partners.

Through our work, we explored how textile waste can be reframed as a resource—transforming overlooked materials into new forms of value.

Working on this project has been an eye-opening journey for our team and a testament to the power of collaboration, field research, and interdisciplinary thinking in addressing complex sustainability challenges.

Learn more about the team:

Caitie Santo (IDBM BIZ)

Ilya Nekrsov (IDBM SCI)

Enni Katajalaakso (IDBM BIZ)

Paju Haulos (IDBM SCI)

Zofia Alka (IDBM ARTS)