Should We Stop Using Wool?

During New York Fashion Week, news that Council of Fashion Designers of America CEO Steven Kolb aggressively silenced a PETA protest taking place during the COS show overshadowed the actual subject of the demonstration: the organisation’s exposure of documented animal mistreatment at farms within the supply chain of the H&M Group, which owns COS, despite those farms being certified as ethical. Activists argue that wool should be banned, but is this really the only solution? And, above all, what would the consequences be?

The request makes sense from an animal welfare perspective: it is no secret that sheep can be subjected to mistreatment during shearing, and that some farms practise so-called mulesing, the removal of strips of skin from the animals’ perianal area to prevent dirt and larvae from accumulating there and thus avoid infections. Certifications such as Nativa and the Responsible Wool Standard (RWS) should ensure that this does not happen, but this is not always the case.

However, abolishing wool appears, at least for now, to be an unrealistic choice. Although wool accounts for less than 1% of the fibres used in fashion — compared with 19% for cotton and 59% for polyester — it is still the most widely used animal fibre, with 1.1 million tonnes consumed each year. Eliminating its use overnight would not be possible, as Emma Håkansson, founder of Collective Fashion Justice, a non-profit organisation advocating for a fashion system that brings together human, animal and environmental rights, also acknowledges.

First and foremost, because of the ecosystem in which wool production exists: sheep farming is part of an economic system that extends beyond wool. Even if the fashion industry stopped using wool tomorrow, sheep would continue to be raised for their meat. Furthermore, unlike wild sheep, farmed sheep grow an extremely thick fleece and necessarily need to be shorn. What would happen to all that wool? Would it simply be disposed of as waste?

Moreover, the intrinsic qualities of wool are extremely difficult to replicate. Wool is natural, breathable and durable; it responds to changes in body temperature and has antimicrobial properties, meaning that it does not need to be washed as frequently as other types of fibres. At present, there are no environmentally sustainable alternatives capable of reproducing all of these characteristics. The risk is therefore that of eliminating one problem only to exacerbate another: the use of synthetic fibres and chemical agents.

Banning wool, therefore, does not automatically mean eliminating the impact attributed to it. We need to ask what would happen to sheep farming and, above all, what we would replace this fibre with.