KEY POINTS:
It is just wrong. The woolly jersey - almost as much of a stalwart of the eco-warrior wardrobe as socks with sandals - has become, well, ethically dubious. Increasingly, cosy knits have a less than warm relationship with both animal welfare and environmental destruction.
Feeding the new industrial knitwear centres (mostly in China and Tirupur in India) are 107 million sheep in Australia, 70 per cent providing merino wool, which, with cashmere, is the yarn of choice.
Merino sheep are fat, with lots of folds of skin - more skin, more wool. Unfortunately, more skin also equals more fly-strike - when flies lay parasitic eggs that poison the sheep, leading to an agonising death.
To counter this, the wool industry practises "surgical mulesing", cutting away an area around the sheep's backside to prevent the blowfly from laying eggs. This is both horrific and agonising.
Animal rights campaigners say it is barbaric, wool producers call it a "necessary evil". Under pressure from big retailers mulesing should be phased out by 2010. For now it lives on, as does the apparent "democratisation" of cashmere.
Once a luxury fabric, it is now used in woollen garments for sale in UK supermarkets at £20 ($54). So how do they do that? The Alashan Plateau in Mongolia provides the answer.
There are now more than 25 million goats (10 times the sustainable number) providing 2600 cashmere processing factories in China and causing a steep decline into desertification and the Mongolia dust bowl as the industry destroys itself.
And it doesn't have to be like that - www.stewartbrown.com or www.cocoonu.com specialise in sustainable cashmere, working with herdsmen in the area.
Wool is the ultimate renewable fabric. It should be sustainable. UK retailer Marks and Spencer recently launched a range of organic jerseys (only available in 11 stores as yet).
The wool is from Argentina and Australia, certified by organic bodies from both countries, and non-mulesed.
Similarly, Eurohike has a biodegradable, chemical-free merino collection which omits chlorine during production.
But organic is just part of the story of sustainable wool. Buy your woollies from independent designers: beautiful alpaca pieces.
No, they're not cheap-as-chips cashmere, but their backstory doesn't unravel under scrutiny.
- OBSERVER
