Will sheep’s wool rise from the depths to which it has sunk, asks Simon Fairlie 

When the reformer and champion of the rural poor William Cobbett was riding around England in the 1820s he would often wear a woollen greatcoat to protect himself from severe weather. But on one occasion, riding through Kent on an apparently fine summer’s day, he was caught out by a heavy downpour without, he tells us, the benefit of this substantial garment.

He wrote in his diary: “I made not the least haste to get out of the rain, I stopped, here and there, as usual, and asked questions about the corn, the hops, and other things. But the moment I got in I got a good fire, and set about the work of drying in good earnest. I have not been in the house an hour; and all my clothes are now as dry as if they had never been wet.”

He doesn’t tell us what he was wearing, but it’s most likely his outer garments were woollen, as were most horse-riders’ clothes at the time – a broadcloth tail coat and breeches, a worsted waistcoat, and a felt hat, perhaps.

Cobbett’s views about getting wet have recently been endorsed in more dramatic fashion by North American backwoodsmen Ralph DiMeo and Trustin Timber, whose YouTube videos show them diving into icy creeks dressed in state-of-the-art woollen clothing and then blithely continuing with their business in sub-zero temperatures, much as Cobbett did in the pouring rain.

I also follow Cobbett on this, without going to such transatlantic extremes. I farm a smallholding on the edge of Dartmoor, and my foul weather wardrobe consists of three tweed jackets, a Melton weave donkey jacket, an ex-US Army sheepskin coat for dry icy weather, and two gansey sweaters. All except the ganseys are secondhand, and all are made of wool, since it’s the best material for winter weather. Wool and fur are the only textile fibres we use that are designed by nature to keep animals warm and dry. It’s therefore unsurprising that they’ve evolved some remarkable properties. If you examine woollen fibres under a microscope you’ll see they’re covered in overlapping scales, which, along with the greasy lanolin, enable wool to shed water far more effectively than linen or cotton. It’s these scales that, when agitated, hook together and allow the material to become felted. But although they shed water, the scales also let the interior cortex of the fibre absorb humidity: wool can absorb up to 30 per cent of its weight in water without feeling damp or clammy.

When the fibres absorb humidity, they do several useful things: they crimp, creating air pockets and a fluffy texture which provides insulation; and, somewhat counterintuitively, they produce heat: if you walk from a warm room into a cold damp night, the wool picks up water vapour, keeping you warm. The same is true if you get caught in a downpour or jump into an icy stream.

And when you’re too hot, wool can absorb sweat from the skin and evaporate it into the atmosphere with a cooling effect. This in turn means that unpleasant bacterial odours don’t build up as quickly as in other materials worn next to the skin, especially plastics that don’t breathe. Wool therefore doesn’t need washing as frequently as other fabrics, and because of its water absorption and shedding qualities, it also washes and dries easily.

Due to these and other properties, wool far outperforms other natural fibres such as cotton and linen as outdoor winter clothing. Its main rival is polyester because it’s cheap, thanks to the artificially low price of the oil from which these garments are made, and the fact that they’re mass produced by underpaid workers in Asian sweatshops.

The virtues of wool have, however, failed miserably to stem the growing tide of plastic clothing, with the result that for many years now a sheep’s fleece has been worth less than what it costs to shear it. The task of shearing all but the poshest sheep has become so pointless that geneticists have developed the Exlana breed, which moults on the arrival of summer, just as their wild ancestors did, thus reversing centuries of selective breeding designed to ensure the wool stays on the hide.

A Shoddy State of Affairs
Back in the 1950s, the last relatively plastic-free decade, nearly all discarded cloth was made of renewable materials. The horse-drawn rag-and-bone man picked up everyone’s unwanted textiles to be shredded and recycled into cardboard and paper, or else into shoddy, a perfectly acceptable cloth whose name has become a pejorative adjective. The bones went for glue.

But once oil-based textiles and glues became dominant, from the 1960s onwards, recycling declined, and rag-and-bone men disappeared. Unwanted clothing became a disposal problem, largely solved by binning, incinerating, or shipping it to the global south where in some countries it is known as “dead white man’s clothes”, and as often as not goes straight to landfill. Nowadays some 44 per cent of the UK’s unwanted clothing is recycled into fillings for mattresses or car doors, but that too soon ends up in landfill.

Recently recycling firms have begun to recycle polyester into new yarn, to create a new generation of plastic shoddy. Recycling polyester into more clothing is not as benign an activity as some would like to make out. Polyester sheds tiny particles which find their way into our oceans, soil, food and bodies. Three quarters of the microplastics found in Arctic seas and two thirds of those in household dust are polyester. Thermal clothing, where the polyester is fluffed up to provide greater insulation or simulate napped wool, is a big culprit. One study found that material from a thermal hoodie released about ten times as many microplastic fibres as did sleeker polyester textiles.

None of these issues occur with used wool and other natural fibres, which can safely be  reused or disposed of pretty much anywhere. Recycled polyester on the other hand dispenses a second diaspora of particles throughout the environment. Recycling plastic also provides a let-out clause for countries and corporations who want to continue drilling for oil. The 2025 Global Plastics Treaty in Geneva collapsed because the High Ambition Coalition of 100 countries which wanted to set limits on the production of plastics couldn’t win over petro-states like the USA and Saudi Arabia.

The debacle at Geneva is another addition to the dismal record of failure to come to grips with the environmental crisis, and there’s unlikely to be any improvement while Trump and Putin remain.

In this regard we might just see a shift in attitude towards plastics if recent revelations  about the levels of microplastic particles found in adult and infant lungs, blood, brains and guts rise up the news agenda. If these insidious particles become associated with human illness, such as Alzheimer’s or the big C, that could see people turning back to natural fibres, whether the government chooses to regulate or not.

This article is from Idler #107.

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