Wool
- Leather is a co-product not a by product and is bad for the environment
- Duck Down feathers
- FourPaws, 2024 discusses wool
Over the course of a year, a sheep typically produces 4.5 kilograms (about 10 lbs.) of wool, providing 10 meters of fabric, enough for six sweaters, three suits, or to cover one large sofa.
- Wool, accounting for 25% of global supply
- The global wool market is currently valued at $35 billion and is expected to reach $47 billion in the next decade.
Negative environmental effects
#Environment
To name just one example, a 2021 study using data from the Swiss sustainability assessment nonprofit Ecoinvent found that wool had far higher greenhouse gas emissions than alternatives for the same amount of fabric, including nearly nine times more than polyester.
According to one analysis of wool production in Australia, by far the world’s top exporter, the wool required to make one knit sweater is responsible for 27 times more greenhouse gases than a comparable Australian cotton sweater, and requires 247 times more land.
Sheep farming threatens native species around the world, from koalas in Australia to sage grouse in the US. Domesticated sheep in the American West have, as my colleague Paige Vega has reported, been implicated in mass die-offs of their wild cousins, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, through the spread of the lethal pathogen Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae.
Wool is cruel
Sheep are subjected to painful mutilations like tail docking and mulesing, a procedure in which skin from their hindquarters is cut off to prevent flystrike, a parasitic infection the animals are prone to because of how they’ve been bred.