Recycled wool: how it is made, its standards and its risks

What recycled wool is

Recycled wool is wool fibre recovered from existing textiles, such as production waste or old garments, and spun into new yarn. A few terms recur throughout this guide.

• Feedstock is the material that goes into recycling.
• Pre-consumer waste is material that never reached a consumer: spinning waste that mills save and re-spin, fabric scraps and cutoffs from sewing factories, and deadstock (unsold fabric or yarn). A brand can also capture waste from its own supply chain.
• Post-consumer waste is garments that have been used, worn and discarded. Recyclers buy them in bales from sorting facilities, and some brands collect their own through take-back programmes.
• Mechanical recycling shreds fabric back into fibre with machines. It is the standard for wool: it preserves the fibre but typically shortens its staple length, the length of the individual fibres.
• Chemical recycling dissolves textiles with solvents. It is used mainly for synthetics and cellulosic fibres; almost no wool is recycled chemically.
• Closed loop means shredding old wool products and spinning them back into wool yarn of similar value. Open loop means turning them into lower-value products, such as insulation or mattress stuffing.
• Legacy chemicals are substances that were permitted when an old garment was made but are restricted now, and that can travel into recycled fibre.

This guide is written from the Good Wool Collective’s June 2026 session on recycled wool, its slides and summary, and the Collective’s Benchmarking Sheet for the standards.