Wool as a Waste Material

Since the middle of the past century, when synthetic fibers began their rise, wool has steadily lost importance in the textile sector, and now is a marginal fiber on the textiles market. Great amounts of non-marketed raw wool have turned from an income source for sheep farmers into a problematic waste, which is, at best, burn or landfill. 

With an increasing interest in the sustainable use of natural resources, wool was reconsidered as an underrated, underused renewable resource, worthy of better exploitation.

Lately, intensive research has been done on finding solutions for wool waste valorization in non-clothing applications. Two main directions to add value to wool waste have developed: in applications that exploit the native fiber properties, and in applications that use the keratin biopolymer, extracted from fibers by chemical solubilization or enzymatic bioconversion.

Wool fibers in the native state are most used for technical applications like green building insulation, polymer-fiber composites, or sorbent materials for water pollution treatment. Keratin and its derivatives are the main considerations for the production of protein-based biomaterials for regenerative medicine. Bioconversion has a significant potential for transforming wool waste into high-value products like fertilizers for organic.

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During the last decades, the share of wool fibers on the global market kept around 1.3%, with no prospects for an increase. Huge amounts of raw wool, rejected by the textile industry, turned from an income source into a waste management issue. The search for sustainable resources determined the reconsideration of raw wool waste as a biodegradable renewable resource, with particular fibrous structure and high content of keratin protein.