Recycled wool

Recycled wool, rag wool or shoddy is any woollen textile or yarn made by shredding existing fabric and re-spinning the resulting fibres. Textile recycling is an important mechanism for reducing the need for raw wool in manufacturing.

A pile of recycled wool.

Shoddy was invented by Benjamin Law of Batley in 1813.[1][2] It was the dominant industry of many neighbouring towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire, known as the Heavy Woollen District, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.[3][4][5][6] Following its decline in the United Kingdom, the centre of the shoddy trade shifted to the city of Panipat in India.[7][8] Efforts have been made to revive the British recycled wool industry in recent years.[9]

Terminology

Historically, recycled wool products were called rag wool. Manufacturers distinguished between three main categories of rag wool:[3]

  • Shoddy – made from loosely woven or "soft" textiles that could be pulled apart relatively easily;
  • Mungo – made from "hard" fabrics such as felts, that were harder to disintegrate but resulted in a finer product;
  • Extract – made from the wool portion of cotton/wool blended fabrics.

In practice, few outside the industry were aware of these distinctions, even when rag wool was widely used.[3][10] The common name was shoddy, which became a generalised term for poor quality goods.[3] It is still used as a technical term for recycled wool within the industry.

Regulators in the United States make a distinction between reprocessed wool, which is made from manufactured wool products that were never used by the consumer, and reused wool, which the consumer has used.[11] Other bodies refer to these as pre-consumer and post-consumer waste material.[12]

The terms virgin wool and new wool are used to distinguish newly-produced, never-used wool from shoddy.[2]: 13 

References
  1. Jubb, Samuel (1860). The History of the Shoddy-trade: Its Rise, Progress, and Present Position. London: Houlston and Wright.
  2. Shell, Hanna Rose (2020). Shoddy: From Devil's Dust to the Renaissance of Rags. Chicago: University of Chicago. pp. 19–35. ISBN 9780226377759.
  3. Malin, John Christopher (1979). The West Riding recovered wool industry, ca. 1813–1939 (PhD thesis). University of York.
  4. Hudson, Pat (11 April 2002). The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of West Riding Wool Textile Industry, C.1750-1850. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521890892.
  5. Clapham, J. H. (20 December 2018). Revival: The Woollen and Worsted Industries (1907). Routledge. ISBN 9781351342483.
  6. Clapp, B. W. (15 July 2014). An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial Revolution. Routledge. ISBN 9781317893035.
  7. "Panipat, the global centre for recycling textiles, is fading". The Economist. 7 September 2017. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
  8. "In Panipat, the world's 'castoff capital', business hangs by a thread". hindustantimes.com/. 28 April 2018. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
  9. "Evergreen: From shoddy manufacture to textile recycling". ENDS Report. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
  10. "A City of Honest Imposture". All the Year Round. 5 (25): 441. 8 April 1871.
  11. Robert E. Freer. "The Wool Products Labeling Act of 1939." Archived 2016-06-05 at the Wayback Machine Temple Law Quarterly. 20.1 (July 1946). p. 47. Reprinted at ftc.gov. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  12. "Recycled Wool: A Primer for Newcomers & Rediscoverers". European Outdoor Group. 13 April 2018. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
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