The Wool Wire | January 30, 2025
Brown sheep prized at last, plus tracking trash, burying wool, hot heads on cool pillows, and booting peat to the curb.
News snippets from the wool world
Hello, my friends,
At times like these, I take great comfort in the continuity that wool offers us. Every day, the sheep graze, the shepherds shepherd, the wool grows, the shearers shear, the mills hum, and the wool still seeks a market. So let's focus on that today—and on a few of the wins that wool has achieved recently.
Booting peat to the curb
Some estimates suggest that almost 6% of global carbon emissions come from the drainage of peatlands, making the quest for a viable alternative extremely important. A new research project in Germany aims to develop sustainable substrates for plant production that would replace the use of peat and plastic in horticulture.
I'll give you one guess what substrate they're testing?
The central innovation of the project lies in processing sheep wool into substrates for plant production. Using a specialized technique known as needle bonding, sheep wool fibers are transformed into stable, seamless tubular structures. These tubes, customizable in diameter and length depending on the plant species, are designed to replace plastic and peat containers as natural substrates.
While peat can take thousands of years to reach just three feet in depth, a sheep can quite happily and without any effort regrow its entire fleece in just one year—making this no-drainer a no-brainer.
Read more about the research project.
Wool and worms
There's something about seeing wool biodegrade before our very eyes that's impossible to resist. I did it in my own garden, King Charles did it at Clarence House, schoolchildren did it in New Zealand, and another New Zealand experiment has reached its conclusion in Otago's Middlemarch.
It began two years ago, when Merino producers Gus Bar and Tara Dwyer decided to bury a much-worn, 50-year-old Swanndri plaid wool "bush shirt." They sandwiched it between mesh wire and buried it under a foot of soil. When they dug it up this fall, they found well-fed worms, a new-looking red synthetic garment label, and no sign of the shirt.
You can read the news story here.
Now I lay me down to sheep?
As a proud reviewer of products and user of wool pillows, I got a kick out of this wool pillow review in Woman and Home magazine, a magazine I didn't even know existed until now.
The reviewer didn't know wool pillows existed until she was tasked with reviewing this one. "Wow this pillow is interesting but I didn’t like it at first," she wrote. "It feels old, heritage, like a chair cushion in a stately home. When you lean on it, it dips but doesn’t spring back as much as a modern foam pillow." The idea of sleeping on a heritage pillow made me laugh, and yet I can see where she's coming from. For the record, she loved the pillow.
Bottom line: Bravo to Woolroom for successfully slipping wool deeper into a market that's been dominated by plastic and feathers for a long, long time. May this story help more people get a good night's sleep.
Caramel Quin
Getting a Grip on Waste
Every year, the fashion industry produces upwards of 92 million tonnes of textile waste—the majority of which is rarely recycled and ends up in landfills. While our ultimate goal should be to slow the churn of fast fashion, it's also important to maximize the potential value of what's currently being trashed.
A new initiative from the Sustainable Trade Initiative, with support from the Laudes Foundation, seeks to do just this. It will create a global database to identify and track textile waste. The goal is not to shame the polluters as much as to gain deeper insight into the "waste landscape" and figure out potential ways to add circularity into the system.
By consolidating data, the platform will unlock opportunities to optimise sourcing and enhance the recycling ecosystem, empowering recyclers, brands, and retailers to innovate, streamline operations, and drive efficiency in textile waste management for a more sustainable industry.
That's a lot of buzzwords. But even if a small bit of this works, it could make a difference.
Here's the Apparel Insider article about the initiative.
Brown is beautiful
If you've been to the fleece sale at a fiber festival, you already know how crazy people go for a black or brown fleece. They usually sell first and at a premium.
Ironically, the same genetic trait for color has long been vilified by the commercial wool industry. They rely on a stable base of white fibers in order to ensure the broadest range of dyeability. It's one of the more fascinating dichotomies in our industry, how the small players cherish color and the bigger ones shun it.
Recently, however, the owner of a naturally colored Merino flock in Australia has managed to break the dichotomy and get Italian luxury brand Loro Piana to use her fibers. They've dedicated a new line to this endeavor, called Pecora Nera. Since the entire flock only numbers 2,500 sheep, the products are pricey and limited. This jacket, for example, will set you back around $4,200.
Peter Howarth
Or you could take up spinning and weaving, score a naturally colored fleece, and set about making a jacket all your own?
On that note, I'll let you go.
Thanks, as always, for your readership and your support.
Until next time,
Clara
