ASPESI S.p.A.
Textile & craft partner
Cotton sourcing, refining the cloth itself, supplying the pilot kits distributed with cookstove programmes on the ground.
- Cotton spec & sourcing
- Cloth manufacture at pilot scale
- Co-branded kit design
A behavioural-science and textile-led intervention helping rural Nepali households adopt clean cooking, and turning the soot they capture into a circular design material.
Most families given a clean cookstove keep lighting the old open fire too. Researchers call it stove stacking. Grants arrive, hardware is distributed, and the smoke keeps rising.
The shortfall is behavioural, not technological. Which means it can be redesigned.
of households stop using the improved cookstove entirely.
Lohani et al., 2025
still rely on traditional open-fire cooking indoors.
Clean Cooking Alliance
premature deaths a year in Nepal from indoor air pollution.
Giri et al., 2025
A clean white cotton square by the stove stays white. Over the open fire, it greys with soot. No words, no literacy needed. Families take it home and hang it where they eat, a daily, domestic reminder of what they've been breathing.
It is the smallest possible object doing the largest possible cognitive job: making an invisible harm visible enough to act on.
The soot the cloth captures is, chemically, close to carbon black, the same pigment base used in ordinary printing ink. Captured, purified to remove heavy metals and carcinogens, and ground fine, it can be reclaimed into ink for textile print and artwork.
A research direction we are actively developing, inspired by the MIT spin-off Graviky Labs and their AIR-INK work. We do not claim a finished product; we claim a serious brief.
This is not a donation. It is a design-and-material partnership with a circular story a house can own, from a family kitchen in the hills of Nepal to a printed cloth in a shop window on your street.
Working idea: commission a Nepali artist to work in the reclaimed soot-ink on a theme drawn from prayer flags, staged as a single shop-window installation. One commission. One measured pilot.
Cotton sourcing, refining the cloth itself, supplying the pilot kits distributed with cookstove programmes on the ground.
Design research, commissioning the Nepali artist, funding a measured pilot and the shop-window commission.
Founded by Guglielmo Catalano, UCL Psychology & Language Sciences. Behavioural science, with a foot in fashion and investment.
We are looking for one textile partner and one design partner for a first measured pilot in 2026.