Rural Press TERRY SIM 27 Aug, 2011
E-wool’s Peter Vandeleur, left, with Patagonia’s Todd Copeland with a NewMerino base-layer T-Shirt
OUTDOOR clothing company Patagonia gave its full support for wool traceability and unmulesed wool production at the Merino2020 conference in Wagga Wagga last week.
While outlining the development of the company’s NewMerino® base layer T-shirts from unmulesed Australian wool, Patagonia strategic environmental materials developer Todd Copeland said he knew there was an issue with mulesing.
“But I didn’t want to just take the advice of the radical groups that say “Just don’t buy wool from Australia.”
He also didn’t want to take a factory’s word that its wool was unmulesed, so there was a need for traceability.
Mr Copeland said the garments were launched in the Northern Hemisphere last month after two years of work with Peter Vandeleur owner of e-wool, NewMerino’s third party supply chain manager. Third party certification was important and all the wool used in the NewMerino® garments came from unmulesed clips with AWEX National Wool Declarations, he said.
“What we were looking with this sustainable wool supply chain was traceability to the growers.
“We wanted that story – we wanted that face up there.”
Mr Copeland said Patagonia also wanted to work with people who were doing adaptive management and progressive methods.
“That’s what we are doing, that’s what our textile mills are doing that’s what our cut and sew guys are doing, that’s what our farmers are doing.”
Mr Copeland said the opportunity with wool to say that woolgrowers protected and worked with natural systems in conserving grasslands could connect with consumers.
The outdoor enthusiast wanted to protect nature, was very closely aligned with the ethical consumer and would get grassland conservation, but didn’t understand farming, he said.
“So there is a disconnect between the way a farmer looks at a sheep and the way someone in New York City views it.
“There is a big disconnect, so animal welfare has changed to not just being cruel to not treating it like your pet,” he said.
Mr Copeland said the Patagonia website told its customers what was potentially bad with some products.
“Anytime we tell our customers what is potentially bad and where we could improve we actually win them over.
“They realise that we are not just telling them all the good, that we were trying to be balanced and they will trust us a little bit more.”
He gave an example of some shorts that were finished with a synthetic water repellent chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid or PFOA, that was persistent in the environment. The chemical use admission prompted a question from Gundagai wool grower Les Carr about whether mulesing could be seen as a good thing because it saved the lives of sheep from death by flystrike.
“It just seems a bit incongruous that on the one hand we can wear apparel that contains a chemical and then on the other hand we’ve got a proven thing that works better than almost anything else in terms of keeping the flies out of the sheep and it’s the enemy.”
Mr Copeland said he wasn’t saying that PFOA was good and the company was phasing its use out by 2013.
“So we can’t bring these issues up and educate our customers about the problems and then not fix them.
“I would be happy to put a video of mulesing on our website and explain to people that it is necessary, but I would also tell them that we were going to source all of our wool from some alternative option that is successful and works for farmers, by a certain date,” he said.
“So that’s the only type of traceability and transparency I can imagine putting on our website with regards to mulesing.”