Press Release: Making Wool Circular

Berlin, 03.11.2021 – Wool is a classic material and it's hard to imagine winter fashion without it. However, what many do not know: Wool production often results in great suffering and injury for the animals. The Berlin-based brand RAFFAUF has therefore rethought the natural fibre and developed a winter collection made from recycled wool.

Recycled textiles are often made from resources outside the industry. Plastic bottles, for example, are turned into recycled polyester fabrics. But how do you recycle a natural fibre like wool? The material is based on a waste product of the fashion industry: worn garments. Large quantities of old wool clothing are collected and sorted by colour. They are washed and ground into tiny fibres from which a completely new fabric is woven. Dying is not required in this process: The original material determines the colour of the resulting fabric.

One of the challenges in production is the low availability of pure wool garments. "We prefer to use pure materials because they can usually be recycled better than mixed fibres. But there is simply not enough worn pure fibre wool clothing to make a pure recycled wool," explains designer Caroline Raffauf. A minimum of 2,000 kilogrammes of waste material is needed per colour to make recycled wool.

Since wool is often mixed with synthetic fibres, those are also found in used garments. In the recycling process, however, wool and synthetic fibres cannot be separated. Instead, the existing mix of materials is processed as a whole. The result is a recycled fibre in which wool meets a variable proportion of different synthetic fibres.

"We are particularly proud of how circular our new material is. The fabric is not only recycled, it can be recycled again and again," says Raffauf. When returned, the label reuses the fibres of the worn pieces again and incorporates them into future collections.

You can download the photo for this press release here. Use permitted for editorial purposes related to RAFFAUF only, source must be named (© David Kavaler / RAFFAUF). We are happy to provide more images upon request.