This year the Product Stewardship component of that legislation was enabled, which makes manufacturers responsible for the end of life disposal of their products. In the example of a television, this would add the $50 it might cost to dismantle and reassimilate all its materials back into production cycles into the purchase price, rather than attempting to recover that cost at the end of its life.
The first six priority products addressed by the legislation are: plastic packaging; tyres; electrical and electronic products (e-waste); agrichemicals and their containers; refrigerants; and farm plastics.
In the seminal book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, the authors Michael Braungart and William McDonough describe remaking our industrial processes to manage a separation between biological nutrients and technical nutrients.
Technical nutrients are finite resources, like aluminium, where the primary energy is in extraction, and these need to be recycled and returned to the crucibles of manufacturing. Biological nutrients on the other hand are those which need to be returned to the earth, composted and become the fertility that grows the next generation of product.
The wool industry has long struggled to muster convincing points as to why a consumer should buy their product, to the point that carpet sales representatives frequently refuse to endorse their products.
But how would Greenpeace market woolen carpets? They would ask where your carpets come from, they would show the oilfields of the Middle East versus the King Country’s green pastures, they would show an infant rolling around in an oil slick on the floor versus on a blanket of natural wool, they would show the inhalation of plastic microfilaments into that infants lungs, they would show those microplastics entering the waterways, being consumed and bioaccumulating up through the food chain, and then they would show the end of life of that carpet.
They would also show that synthetic carpet lying in a landfill, a thousand years from now, never to decay, a permanent blight on the living world, while they would show a woolen carpet going into an industrial composting facility, pure compost rolling out the other end, and that returning to a farm to grow the next carpet.
For most of the millenia, since hominids gave up their fur, our ancestors have relied on plant and animal fibre to keep us warm, and no fibre has warmed us like wool. Wool has clothed us, given us blankets for the cold winters and rugs for floor coverings. Humankind has been in symbiosis with our plant and animal domesticates, and much of the complexity of the modern world would not have been possible without these relationships. It is time to forget this gross and absurd chapter of consuming the finite fossil resource just to replace what the living world provides us.
It is important to recognise the moments to build bridges between those who seek to protect the natural world and those that derive their livelihoods from the natural world to achieve our common goals. If the coarse wool industry were to recognise Product Stewardship as the gateway to a radical shift in consumer demand, lobbying the Green Party for both carpets and home insulation to become the next priority products to be addressed under the legislation, then the wool industry could return to the place it belongs.
If the cost of dissecting a synthetic carpet into its various materials, and returning those materials to their manufacturers were included in its price, then it would level the playing field with woolen carpets.
The industry could seek Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certification to enjoy international recognition as a leader in a space where synthetics can never compete. This would give the industry a massive ecological, technical and marketing advantage over the tragedy that is synthetics.
Who am I? Simon Thomson has a 260ha drystock farm near Raglan, and is a Materials Technologist who has worked in Research & Development of high performance composites in the drone and yacht racing industries, and natural fibres and biopolymers within the agricultural industry.
