The animal rights action group PETA has launched a competition to develop a vegan alternative to sheep’s wool with a lower environmental impact. The Vegan Wool Challenge Award promises the $1M prize money to the first person or company to develop a material that convincingly resembles sheep wool in its texture, functionality and appearance, and has a major clothing brand invest into the material.
The competition comes at a time when new biomaterials – typically made from natural substances without harming the environment – are becoming more popular in fashion. According to the nonprofit organization Material Innovation Initiative, investments in the burgeoning industry have reached $2.3B since 2015.
According to Dezeen, a slew of companies are already racing to create biomaterial alternatives to leather and silk, made of everything from mushroom mycelium, a bovine leather made from fungi, to natural rubber and rice husks, which have been highly publicized and adopted by brands from Adidas to Balenciaga to Hermès to The North Face.
In 2018, PETA ran another vegan wool competition in collaboration with fashion house Stella McCartney, which crowned a material called Woocoa made from coconut fibers and hemp as its winner. However, wool alternatives don’t yet appear to have gained as much traction as other substitutes for animal products, such as alternative leathers.
Peta has long campaigned against wool production and the animal cruelty of the industry. And wool is also under fire when it comes to the environment. Like cows, sheep release lots of methane into the atmosphere, and they require farming land. The wool trade is a big industry, valued at $4.72B in 2018.
“Even on ‘sustainable’ and ‘responsible’ farms, workers beat, stomped on, cut up and slit the throats of conscious, struggling sheep,” PETA claimed. “The creation of a viable, sustainable vegan wool could help abate suffering and fight the climate catastrophe, as the wool industry produces massive amounts of methane, erodes soil and contaminates waterways.”
According to the Pulse Report, released by the Global Fashion Agenda in 2017, wool was ranked the fourth-worst material for the environment, just behind the widely derided cotton. It revealed that synthetic fabrics, including acrylic, polyester, spandex and rayon, were less environmentally damaging. The Higgs Material Sustainability Index ranks wool’s impact at 81 out of 300. Cotton scored 99, and polyester 41. “Among animals, sheep are second only to cows when it comes to the production of the greenhouse gas methane,” PETA said.
PETA stipulates that the winning entry of the Vegan Wool Challenge will need to be a biomaterial, one that is biodegradable or recyclable. It also needs to work like wool across different weights (like a thick sweater vs. a fine pair of socks), and keep wearers warm. Although the competition does not explicitly prohibit the use of plastics. This is despite the fact that substitutes for other animal byproducts including leather have previously been criticized for making use of plastic binders or films, which are not renewable and could hinder their biodegradability and recyclability.
However, Industry organizations including British Wool have challenged PETA’s animal cruelty claims, arguing they are not representative of the industry at large while underlining the benefits of wool as being biodegradable, durable and generally washed less than other materials without shedding microplastics into the environment.
“There’s no denying that the fashion industry needs better sustainable solutions, but we must be mindful that new initiatives, such as those which directly, or indirectly, encourage use of synthetics, do not cause more harm than good,” British Wool’s marketing director Graham Clark told The Guardian. Farmers are also exploring alternative methods of cutting the emissions associated with raising sheep, making use of regenerative farming practices and feeding the animals seaweed to reduce their methane output.
According to the competition rules, entrants have until July 2023 to submit a fabric sample and production plan. Should they be successful, they will then be encouraged to partner with “at least one of the top 10 global clothing retail brands” to produce and sell items made from their material in the US by January 2024. Any individual or company with annual revenue under $30M can enter.
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