Wool, the Champion of Textile Recycling

In the fashion industry, there's a lot of talk about textile recycling as a future solution that still needs significant development. What's less often mentioned is that for wool, this future solution has existed for generations and works remarkably well.

Although wool accounts for only about 1% of the global textile fiber market—a surprisingly small figure given its reputation—it represents nearly 5% of the total volume of clothing donated for recycling and reuse. This disproportion reveals something important: wool is a material so valued by those who wear it that it naturally finds a second life much more often than the average of other fibers.

Wool recycling primarily works in three ways. There's closed-loop recycling, where a used garment is mechanically disassembled back into raw fiber, then re-spun into new yarn. There's also open-loop recycling, where recovered fiber becomes the basis for a different product, such as insulation. And finally, there's the pure creativity of reuse: transforming an old wool jacket into a bag, or using production scraps to make other objects. Very little wool, ultimately, truly ends up in the trash.

This reality aligns directly with the circular economy philosophy that Makeloo Studio seeks to embody, not just promote in words. When we process a fleece, fibers too short to be spun—the noils resulting from our combed process—are never simply discarded: they become the raw material for our circular products.

For you, as a craftsperson, keeping your own scraps with the same intention—rather than considering them as waste—can become a simple habit, yet profoundly consistent with the values that wool itself already represents.

Source: International Wool Textile Organisation, Wool Notes, Issue 3 (2024).