Washed white as snow

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, April 28th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

A few weeks ago, WORLD Correspondent Amy Lewis introduced us to a retired sheep farmer by the name of Dennis Richmond. He reflected on raising sheep for the past 50 years.

DENNIS: Sheep are sort of known for being a bit cantankerous. It’s almost as if they’ve got their will and they don’t want their will broken as well…

BROWN: But Richmond’s farm is only the first step in the process—getting the wool to grow. But in order to get the wool from the backs of sheep to your back in the form of a sweater—it has to be cleaned.

REICHARD: Today, Amy explains how they do that, as she brings us along to one of the last wool scouring and carbonizing mills in Australia.

AMY LEWIS, REPORTER: A red brick building with a sawtooth roofline sprawls not far from the Barwon River in Geelong. This is the Riversdale Scouring and Carbonising Mill, built in the 1920s. For a hundred years the wool from millions of sheep has moved through this plant. It comes in greasy and heavy. It leaves soft and billowy white.

Jim Robinson’s family bought the business in the 1980s. It’s one of only three wool scouring mills left in the entire country.

ROBINSON: Oh, look, it's, we would have just survived just by being an independent, small operator. It's a family business. All the corporates have sort of pulled out of this.

The process of cleaning wool hasn’t changed much over the last hundred years. But what workers used to do by hand is now done by large machines.

AUDIO: [Machines]

The other two mills in Australia own all the wool they process. Robinson’s mill is unique: Individual clients bring him their raw wool–whether it’s two bales or 200. Employees empty the wool from canvas bags into the vast mouth of the machine where it’s scoured by swishing through baths of hot water and detergent.

Wool wending through the scouring bath Photo by Amy Lewis

Wool wending through the scouring bath Photo by Amy Lewis

AUDIO: [Squeaking, “scour bowl”]

The keratin fibers known as wool are now free of grease. Next, they go through a diluted acid bath that turns all the plant matter—like grass and burrs—to black carbon.

ROBINSON: Yeah, so all this vegetable matter that might have been a light brown or it's a seed or, you know, a tree burr will turn black, which you can basically just crush out, crush in your fingers, but we put it through these fluted rollers, and then de-dust it and then we end up with, with wool which is now free of grease and dirt and now free of vegetable matter…

What might take a crafter weeks to accomplish by hand takes a little over an hour at Riversdale. With the wool clean and free of debris, it’s time for a little pH balancing and some light bleaching. Then, the wool is ready to spin into yarn.

Fluffy wool at the end of the process Photo by Amy Lewis

Bales of clean wool ready for shipping Photo by Amy Lewis

It might be made into Pendelton blankets. It might become an expensive Italian suit or spun into skeins of yarn and sold at a local farmstand. It might even travel to England.

ROBINSON: The cloth that goes into the uniforms for the Queen's guard. So all you see in London all their red, the beautiful red cloth. That's, that was wool that comes from our plant.

Almost half the weight of each incoming wool bale comes from dirt and grease. All that waste has to go somewhere. In the old days, workers just dumped it into the river. One of the largest expenses of cleaning wool today is getting rid of the debris and dirty water responsibly.

AUDIO: [Grease machines]

ROBINSON: But that, that's probably one of the reasons why this…this operation did close in 1927, they cited the high cost of the Geelong and district waterboard trade waste charges…

AUDIO: [Treatment Plant]

Ten years ago, Robinson installed a costly treatment plant. It bubbles all the dirt and debris to the surface of a large tank. The muck gets skimmed off and sent to a nearby farmer. He composts it and grows millet in the soil gathered from the backs of sheep from all over Australia. The captured grease gets converted to vitamin D3 supplements and lanolin for cosmetics.

Robinson is conscious of the impact his business has on the environment. But he’s also concerned for the animals whose wool he processes. Merino sheep grow fine and soft wool. But their bodies have many folds of skin. And in all the wrong places. Like near their tail, which is removed to keep the area clean.

Here’s Dennis Richmond, the retired sheep farmer.

RICHMOND: It’s called mulesing. It’s when you’re taking the tail off and earmarking the lamb, a little bit of skin is also taken off around the tail to keep the skin nice and tight, so it doesn’t get stained or dirty to attract the flies, which then lay their eggs, which cause the flystrike, which kills them!

To mules or not to mules. It’s a bloody and painful process for the sheep. Ethical treatment of a Merino sheep is complicated. The farmer inflicts pain on a lamb to prevent its death by flystrike. If he doesn’t, he could be subjecting the sheep to a miserable death. The middle road these days is to use dry ice to numb the bum or to use medicinal pain relief. But the long-term goal of many farmers is to actually breed out the crinkly skin. Here’s Richmond’s son Mark.

RICHMOND: It just takes such a long time to change the genetic makeup of the animals. That, yeah, you just gotta keep on hammering and hammering.

And that brings gets us back to Robinson. Being a boutique business means doing things differently, and hopefully better. Robinson’s clients comply with higher standards for their sheep and farms. Robinson also meets Responsible Wool Standards or RWS. That means an annual audit.

ROBINSON: We've just got to be sort of, you know, just at the forefront of these things, yeah.

Thanks to processors and farmers like Robinson and Richmond, the industry is moving toward more wise stewardship. And Robinson believes that cleaning his clients’ wool to the highest standards sets up his business for success. Maybe for another hundred years.

ROBINSON: I think it's an industry here that's been now 100, 200 years old. And they're still going to be sheep being grown and bred here for their meat and wool. So there's always going to be wool in Australia that needs to be scoured.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis in Geelong, Australia.

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