The way forward for WOOLUME

Erlend Hua Lun Kok on 21. May 2024

As the Woolume project comes to an end after three and a half fruitful years, a new project note has been published.

Economics and scale are important themes, especially for moving forward with better use of local wool. As identified in other projects, things need to happen in the right order and there must be an economic fundament that ensures a professionalism and not that what one does is done on a hobby basis. The skills gap is an important issue if there is to be a future for the wool industry in Europe, and this must be addressed at national and EU level, this is not something a project or industry can fix on their own.

WOOLUME has been a bilateral project with only two countries involved, and few project-partner institutions. Usually projects involve more countries, many more institutions and therefore also are ’messier’ in the way that one needs to involve all actors in several research questions and WPs. On the other hand, the research in more complexly structured projects is often more limited and must stick to one problem-definition in order to make the project doable.

If we are going to be scaling textile industry in Europe, based on our local resources and better use of them, many things must happen at the same time. One is that those who grant money for research must be aligned with the planetary boundaries and with making a positive impact for planet, people and animals. The zealots also must have room to ‘play’ outside the strict confinements of complex EU funding, which most probably must be backed by national governments, who see the value of being self-sufficient not only when it comes to food, but also for textiles.

Summary

This note looks at knowledge transference between a country of high wool utilisation (Norway) and a country of low wool utilisation (Poland). The findings that are presented here, are collected through semi-structured interviews, via Zoom, in person and also with one written response. All interviewees were project partners. Economics and scale are important themes, especially for moving forward with better use of local wool. As identified in other projects, things need to happen in the right order and there must be an economic fundament that ensures a professionalism and not that what one does is done on a hobby basis. The skills gap is an important issue if there is to be a future for the wool industry in Europe, and this must be addressed at national and EU level, this is not something a project or industry can fix on their own.

Click here to read full report.

The Plastic Elephant tramples into the international conference room

tobiasson on 6. October 2023

Presenting the Plastic Elephant report on stage in Biella.

The opening session at the Natural Fiber Connect conference in Biella, Italy at the very end of September, put the increasingly frequently mentioned elephant in the room center stage, namely overproduction and the plasticization that characterizes the textile industry.

The fact that the Italian Minister of the Environment opened the conference with a video greeting testifies to how important the textile industry is to the Italians, and not least how seriously they take the environmental problems that the same industry stands for. But in contrast to the industry as a whole, they have a great understanding that production, and particularly of synthetic materials, must be reduced considerably – which means more expensive textiles and more focus on natural fibres. This is music to the ears of the Italian industry, but also to natural fiber representatives who had gathered in Biella: cashmere, alpaca, wool, cotton and silk producers from farm level up to spinning mills, weaving mills and other industries.

Weighting the environmental burden

The key note speech was given by Veronica Bates-Kassatly. In contrast to Make The Label Count’s approach, which is currently persistently arguing that more parameters must be included in EU’s PEFCR, such as biodegradability, microplastics and renewability; Bates-Kassatly had the opposite approach. She believes that greenhouse gas emissions must be weighted much more (i.e. CO2 emissions in her argument), and that many of the 16 parameters that the EU’s Joint Research Center has decided should be included should be cut out or weighted much less. This includes water use and land use, two things which turns out to be unfortunate for natural fibres, but where the differences are large on a global basis so that average figures make very little sense. For example, a Norwegian sheep on open pasture will use huge areas of land to produce a few kilograms of wool, and this counts negatively.

Stand to increase plastics rather than decrease

A recent report from SIFO, the Plastic Elephant, followed Bates-Kassatly’s key note and the silk industry’s strong criticism of the data base for Higg and PEF (silk comes out as the worst fibre). The main message in the SIFO report is that a review of policy instruments, strategies from the industry and NGOs shows that to a very small extent they consider what can be done to reduce the volumes and not least to reduce the large increase over the last 40 years in synthetic materials and fast fashion. When the EU’s Textile Strategy wants to make “fast fashion out of fashion”, none of the tools in the toolbox are sufficient and, if anything, they will increase plasticisation. The report explains why, and the audience at the conference nodded their heads tellingly when the reasoning was explained.

The fact that the audience laughed out loud and applauded when the actual background for the Plastic Elephant report was presented at the start was, of course, liberating. This meant taking the audience back to the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2017, where the first Pulse report postulated that consumers must be persuaded to prefer synthetics to cotton; and where EcoAge’s Livia Firth asked H&M’s Helena Helmersson: “Why do you have to produce so much and constantly push new collections on consumers?” Helmersson replied that they are only doing what consumers want, to which Firth replied: “My children want sugar every single day, but do I give it to them? No.” The laughter resounded and a huge applause followed.

“Sugar” became the word of the day

The rest of the day, “sugar” was the word repeated over again, as equivalent with unhealthy consumption, and related to synthetics. Which means deplastification – also in the textile sector – may finally be on the agenda. To watch the whole morning session, go to this LinkedIn link. The Plastic Elephant report is easy to find here.

THE PLASTIC ELEPHANT: Overproduction and synthetic fibres in sustainable textile strategies

Lisbeth Løvbak Berg on 30. June 2023

Authors: Ingun Grimstad Klepp, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg, Anna Schytte Sigaard, Tone Skårdal Tobiasson and
Lea Gleisberg

Summary

In this report, we examine national, international and corporate strategies for sustainable textiles to understand if and how they embrace the increased production volumes based on synthetic materials, which can be referred to as the ‘plastic elephant in the room’. This is done through a lens of four questions. First, we look at whether the strategies discuss growth in production volumes and possible measures to stop this growth. Second, we examine whether they address the plastification of textiles. By plastification, we mean the increasing share of plastic fibres used for textile production. Third, whether they discuss the raw material for plastics, and fourth, plastic waste. The results show that none of these questions that can reduce the environmental impacts of clothing production are given a central role in the strategies.

Click here to read the full report.