Disclaimer: These are my personal views and do not represent any organization or professional advice.
Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:46:31 +0200
Wool's not wool
Last year my family and I went through our clothing and got rid of anything containing synthetic fibres (polyester, nylon, viscose, rayon, elastane, etc,.), leaving only items made of pure cotton, hemp, silk, linen, leather and wool. We did this not only for health reasons but also to remove microplastic fibres from the wastewater of our washing machine as the water leaving the house (minus toilets) irrigates part of our garden.
I thought with this change we were done. All synthetic fibres removed. No more plastic on our skin or microplastics in our wastewater. Well, I was wrong. A few months later, I stumbled upon someone writing about wool and the "superwashing" process it undergoes and it flabbergasted me.
For those unaware, wool —and by extension any product made of it— is descaled using a caustic agent (typically chlorine) and then coated in a nylon polymer resin (plastic) in order to make it machine washable. Worse still, there is no requirement for this to be on the label!
Superwashed wool appears as "100% wool" and the only obvious clue for determining whether it was superwashed is if the label says the item is machine-washable. If the label says "hand-wash only" or "dry-clean only", the wool is most definitely untreated. There are methods to determine precisely if wool was supercoated or not but I leave this as an exercise to the reader. If this is something you care about, look into it.
After a final cull of all superwashed wool clothing, we were at last plastic-free. Wool, what I once thought benign, natural and pure was actually covered in plastic all along. I lived my whole life falsely believing wool was wool and oh boy, what a fool I was.
Wood is no longer wood, wine is no longer wine, bricks aren't bricks and bread's not bread. Nothing is what it is anymore and unless you have a discerning eye, you will surround yourself with cheap and dangerous imitations of real things which existed long ago. Nothing is real. Wool's not wool.
—Dylan Araps