I was brought up supporting wool. It was a natural product, biodegradable and non-polluting. We’ve always had wool carpets and we proudly wear woollen clothes.
Recently, however, we’ve heard a considerable amount of histrionics denigrating wool. How, in the believe it or not category, it is worse for the environment than synthetics?
I read a recent story that told me if I wanted a planet-friendly building then I should choose synthetics not wool.
There were two issues in the story that titillated me.
The first was the on-farm methane emissions caused by sheep while producing the wool. So sheep produce more pollution than a chemical reaction to produce synthetics?
The second was that wool, when it ended its useful lifestyle, emits methane when it biodegrades. The argument was that synthetics can be recycled.
Some can, others end up in landfills with the resultant pollution.
I’m unaware that biodegradable wool has anything like the pollution of plastics including the microplastics that pollute our airways and our oceans.
Another article was even more hysterical in its denigration of wool.
A Vox article by one Marina Bolotnikova tried to explain the “greenwashing of wool”. She was from an outfit called Future Perfect.
In what was in my view an hysterical outburst she told me that sheep emit “massive volumes of methane and take up vast land areas that could otherwise host native, carbon sequestering ecosystems”.
We read that in Australia the wool required to make one sweater is responsible for 27 times more greenhouse gases than the cotton in a comparable sweater and requires 247 times more land.
The article goes on to tell me that sheep brought by colonists to Australia “immediately trampled and destroyed all of the native yams and edible vegetables that Aboriginal people had”.
It gets better. A 2021 report by the Centre for Biological Diversity and Collective Fashion Justice says: “But wool is not a fibre simply provided by nature – it is a scaled product of modern industrial, chemical, ecological and genetic intervention that’s a significant contributor to the climate crisis, land degradation, water use, pollution and biodiversity loss.”
The article went on to tell me that wool ranked worse than synthetics.
I’d be surprised if your view of those outbursts wasn’t like mine, but it does tell us of the opposition to natural fibres.
I do not remotely accept that wool is worse for the planet than synthetics. The issue is that the opposition to wool has galvanised and I don’t believe that we’re adequately countering that view.
For example, cotton does take less land than wool, but the carbon footprint of processing and manufacturing is higher.
I believe we can expect more opposition to wool, which I’d bet comes from the vested interests of the synthetics industry. As we’re seen thus far, it’s not a matter of arguments based on fact but that anything goes.
It was, therefore, great to see a discussion on wool and its future at the recent Primary Industries Summit.
The discussion was wide ranging with different views expressed on the current opportunities for wool.
It was basically agreed that the present auction system wasn’t and hasn’t been remotely beneficial to producers. That it promoted a “race to the bottom”.
Several alternatives to cutting out the middleman were offered with the idea of a tender process canvassed.
There was general agreement around the opportunities for wool and it was agreed that change needs to happen.
The minister responsible for the wool industry is Mark Patterson. He’s a farmer in his own right and chaired Otago Federated Farmers. He knows the industry.
His view on the synthetic campaign is simply that “wool is a great product” and that the anti-campaign “can only make the claims it has by screwing the scrum”.
He believes that “wool’s sustainability is undeniable” and that “there is a growing awareness of the massive pollution caused by microplastics”.
Patterson also felt there needs to be a “focus on industry leadership” and I would certainly agree. That “there needs to be a genuine farmer industry-led organisation”. That “the government would support and enable any serious moves to get the industry back on track”.
I believe that’s extremely positive.
The harsh reality is that wool has been a basket case for generations and farmers have been responsible for that.
Over the years we’ve had many schemes that have been promoted but none that I’m aware of that have worked.
So now we have farmers acknowledging the problem and genuinely looking to find a way to move forward.
We have Federated Farmers wool spokesperson Toby Williams, who I rate. He is more than capable of leading the farmer wool reform group.
We also have Patterson offering government encouragement and support.
Hopefully those two can lead a long-awaited renaissance for an incredible product.
In Focus Podcast: How can the sector return fair value to wool growers?
We have a different type of show this episode.
Bryan moderated some of the panel discussions at the 2024 Primary Industries Summit in Wellington. One of them was on the future of wool and brought together some of the leaders in an industry that is struggling to return fair value to growers. How can we turn this around?
Join Bryan as he discusses the way forward with Federated Farmers meat and wool chair Toby Williams; Minister for Rural Communities Mark Cameron; farmer and agri-advocate Heather Gee-Taylor; and Devold NZ general manager and Campaign for Wool trustee Craig Smith.
