Woolmark’s latest advertisement: green-washing and ethics-washing

Woolmark, the marketing body of the wool industry, recently released a new advertisement. It opens dramatically to people swimming in pools of crude oil, their faces and bodies coated in the thick, toxic wetness. Then, the drenched figures pull off their clothes, revealing themselves to instead be wearing pure white wool knitwear, standing in sunshine amongst a beautiful landscape.

The opening scene is paired with with an Ellen MacArthur foundation statistic on the intensive use of fossil-fuel derived synthetics in fashion: “Every 25 seconds an Olympic-sized pool of oil is used to make synthetic clothing”. Woolmark goes on to promote the natural fibre that is wool, and all of its supposed benefits.

Wool versus fuel: a false dichotomy

While standing firmly against the powerful rise of fossil fuels in fashion is critical, immediately, there's a problem with this advertisement. A false dichotomy is set up: if you want to avoid synthetics, you need to buy wool.

In reality, there are numerous fibres to make knitwear, suiting and base layers normally made from wool (or now, synthetics) from: hemp, recycled and organic cotton, bamboo lyocell, Tencel – which holds similar thermo-regulating and moisture-whicking properties – and other recycled materials. Not to mention more up and coming innovation in the plant-based space.

The choice to set up wool as the sole opposing force rallying against synthethics in fashion is not new from the marketing body: their ongoing series of ads set up to appear like garment tags have for some years pushed lines like 'I'd shed millions of plastic fibres if I weren't wool'. These simplified statements not only misdirect viewers away from more ethical and sustainable alternatives, but ignore the science around microfibre pollution: we know that all fibres can harm the ocean, depending on how they are dyed and treated. In fact, research suggests most microfibres in the ocean are not plastic.

Just as Woolmark – along with Eco Age, and the many others in the industry that have promoted this ad – have concealed the reality of plant-based and non-wool alternatives to fossil fuels, they have intentionally hidden the origins of wool from sight.

Counting sheep

Woolmark’s advertisement does not show a single sheep.

While making it crystal clear where synthetic materials come from through the opposingly opaque oil pools shown, Woolmark deceptively cuts out wool's own raw material source from their ad: animals.

Sheep in the wool industry are routinely exploited, mutilated and ultimately slaughtered when they are no longer profitable. At the root of industrial wool production is the commodification of sheep, of thinking, feeling individuals.

Woolmark wants the viewer to forget this truth, especially as fashion consumers become increasingly cognisant of the need to include animals in a holistic view of ethics and sustainability in fashion. A view which, beyond incremental welfare improvements, recognises the inherent injustice of rearing individuals for financial gain in a system which puts their wellbeing last, which would sooner kill them than their profit margin.

So, instead of showing sheep, Woolmark shows natural landscapes. Vast, green, rocky and rich. But it's such natural landscapes that the wool industry are invading.

Rolling green hills of degraded land

Wool production is highly land inefficient, requiring large swathes of space to produce far less fibre than if one simply grew plant fibres, or even produced lyocell materials. As a result, sheep rearing is a leading cause of land destruction and in turn, biodiversity destruction in fashion. Rolling green hills that are bare of trees and vegetation which once grew there are not truly ‘natural’, but in a state of arrested development, unable to support a wide range of flora and fauna. And while sure, some systems are more holistically managed, reducing the amount of devastating land degradation that is so common in conventional wool farming, the sheer amount of land required to shear sheep cannot be overlooked.

Claiming concern for the climate crisis in this advertisement, the wool industry fails to acknowledge that a move beyond animal agricultural production by 2050 would free up so much land for rewilding and restoration that up to 163% of our carbon emissions budget to 1.5C could be sequestered. That’s the kind of climate action we need, alongside a transition away from fossil fuels — not incremental change to an industry that’s intrinsically linked to inefficiency and massive methane emissions.

Artwork: Ari Liloan for our Shear Destruction: Wool, Fashion and Biodiversity report with Center for Biological Diversity

The ‘natural’ fallacy

It’s simple to push the idea of ‘natural’ onto citizen consumers who are interested in protecting the planet when they make purchases. But the fallacy of what’s natural being inherently good and sustainable is being played with here, because while wool is a natural fibre which grows out of the backs of sheep, it’s not natural for there to be so many sheep, who release so much methane into the atmosphere through enteric fermentation.

In Australia, about 70 million sheep roam landscapes once abundant with indigenous wildlife and vegetation, landscapes that were reported to be destroyed by the introduction of the wool industry at colonisation. These sheep cover more than 85 million hectares of land and contribute massively to Australia’s emissions. This is true globally, too, as small ruminants release 474 metric tons of CO2e into the atmosphere annually. Transitioning beyond raising these animals would be equal to removing 103 million cars from roads for a year. More than 5 times the number of cars in Australia.

Is any of this really ‘natural’, or is it just harming the natural world?

The natural properties of wool are further lost in the industrial production during the standard scouring process, in which often chemical-intensive and polluting baths remove grease, suint and other impurities from the wool, while it’s also often dyed, bleached and otherwise treated. One of the most common substances used in wool scouring is known to feminise fish when released into waterways — as so much effluent from these scouring facilities is — devastating their populations.

Wool is finally being pulled off our eyes

The good news amongst this clear display of green-washing and ethics-washing? People are catching it. It’s not working as well as it may have a couple of years ago, when an understanding of the need to shift beyond unsustainable and unjust animal agriculture was less developed.

With no time left to waste in addressing the climate crisis — which is undoubtedly a crisis of justice, and of placing profit before the protection of individuals, regardless of their species — this kind of advertising is running out of time in which it can effectively fool the masses.

We’re working to ensure that time is as short as possible, as we continue our work for a total ethics fashion system.