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Use phase of apparel: A Literature review for Life Cycle Assessment with focus on wool.

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This report presents a literature review of clothing use phase. The purpose is to support improved methodological development for accounting for the use phase in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of apparel. All relevant textile fibres are included in the review. However, the main focus is on wool. We ask whether the use of wool has different environmental impacts than clothes in other fibres. The report builds on a review of literature from the past 20 years. The review showed that clothing made from different materials are used, and reused in different ways. Wool is washed differently as it has about ten degrees lower washing temperature than the average laundry in Europe. Wool is also more likely to be either dry-cleaned or washed by hand than other textiles. Moreover, when dried, it is less likely to be tumble-dried.

Opprinnelsesmerking av norsk ull

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Hensikten med denne rapporten er å undersøke mulighetene for en opprinnelsesmerking av norsk ull. Et slikt merke kan bidra til økt bevissthet og oppmerksomhet om norsk ull både blant produsenter og forbrukere, og dermed styrke produksjon og salg av lokal ull. Rapporten diskuterer en rekke argumenter for en merkeordning. Blant annet at et offisielt merke kan være et hjelpemiddel mot en til dels uryddig markedsføring av ull som vi ser i dag. Dessuten kan det fremme ulike kvaliteter ved norsk ull.
Rapporten bygger på ulike data inkludert intervjuer med aktører i verdikjeden og forbrukerundersøkelser. Erfaringer med merkeordninger fra andre land samt ulike mat-og miljømerkeordninger er også diskutert. Rapporten kan fungere som et kunnskapsgrunnlag for en eventuell etablering av en merkeordning, og den utreder ulike alternative ordninger, men uten å ta stilling til hvordan en merkeordning faktisk bør organiseres.

Wool as an Heirloom: How Natural Fibres Can Reinvent Value in Terms of Money, Life-Span and Love

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This paper addresses a main challenge for natural fibres; falling prices and increased focus on quantity versus quality. This is a challenge not only related to economic issues and profit, but is also unsustainable in an environmental perspective and in light of the challenges the textile sector and the world face. The paper uses wool as an example and in a surprising approach links the history and century-old traditions of natural fibers to an environmental thinking which supplements the traditional thinking around circular economy and LCA. Fabrics with a long life are the ones that have the lowest environmental impact (Fletcher and Tham2015; Laitala2014). Longevity or lifespan is a complex phenomenon in which both technical and social, or aesthetic aspects, are intertwined.

Wool you wear it? – woollen garments in Norway and the United Kingdom

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This article was developed from the project ‘Valuing Norwegian Wool’ initiated by the Norwegian National Institute for Consumer Research to generate knowledge on how wool can contribute to sustainable textile consumption, and how value creation can be increased in the Norwegian wool industry. The article will compare consumer perceptions, attitudes, practices and knowledge concerning wool as a material and as garments in Norway and in the United Kingdom, through a case study of wardrobes owned by six middle-class families.
The aim is to generate knowledge about the diverse web of aspects that influence consumption of woollen garments. The wardrobe study as a method aims to include the materiality of garments in clothes research in a more direct way. Analysing the materiality in connection with the social and cultural aspects of clothes gives us a better understanding of the relations between materiality and practice.

Why Cotton as Linen? The Use of Wool in Beds in Norway

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Cotton is the “natural” choice and the dominating material in bed linen and sleepwear in Norway as in many other European countries. Regulation of temperature and humidity are important for good sleep, but they are not cotton’s strong points. There must have been other than the functional reasons which made cotton the winner in the bedding market. This article builds on literature about bedding in Norway from the 1800s and survey questions from 1951. We ask the question: what materials have been used and why? Wool was used in all bed textiles, both closest to the body and the layers over and under, from the cheapest chopped rags to the most costly textiles. The decline was seen throughout the 1800 and 1900s, but only in the 1960s does wool become totally absent as a next to skin bed textile. The cheap imports of cotton made cottage industry and home production unprofitable and the new emphasis on cleanliness gave cotton a clear leverage.

 Woolbed

Ingun Grimstad Klepp, Kirsi Laitala og Tone Skårdal Tobiasson Sammendrag Vi har undersøkt mulighetene for å gjeninnføre ull som sengetekstil. Barrierer for bruk av ull i nattøy og sengetøy blant norske og svenske forbrukere er…  Woolbed

Valuing Norwegian Wool

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Wool has been called the white gold and has warmed and brought joy to the Norwegian population throughout history. It is also a textile fibre with many unused features. The starting point of the project Valuing Norwegian Wool is a desire to help Norwegian agriculture, wool based industry, and design to exploit the potential inherent in Norwegian wool as raw material, and in the Norwegian textile tradition. Norway has a thriving textile industry and several strong companies that produce products made of wool. The marketing of the origin of the raw material these products are produced from is however rather inadequate and sometimes misleading. While fewer and fewer of the products are made of Norwegian wool, consumers – not without reason – take it for granted that Norwegian producers use Norwegian wool.

Potential of Woolen Materials in Health Care

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Woolen textiles may have more potential use areas within the health care than what they are used for today. They have many benefits such as being self-extinguishing, flexible, and having high isolation as well as moisture absorption properties. While absorbing moisture it releases heat, and as the evaporation rate is slow, woolen materials do not give a rapid chill that some other faster drying materials have. Therefore wool can hold lot of moisture before feeling wet. Due to wool’s potential to shrink in wash, the challenge has been how to wash wool to get it clean enough for health care use. Laboratory experiments were designed in order to see woolens’ tolerance to different washing treatments, as well as their properties related to soil repellence and stain removal.