The town that invented textile recycling — and why wool is still the only fibre we can truly close the loop on

The town that invented textile recycling — and why wool is still the only fibre we can truly close the loop on

*Published by Samantha, founder of Teddy Locks*

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In 1813, a man named Benjamin Law in Batley, West Yorkshire, worked out how to shred old woollen rags back into spinnable fibre. He kept it secret for years — competitors were watching, and the process was valuable enough that he reportedly veiled his methods even from neighbours. What he had discovered would turn a small market town into the recycling capital of the world.

By 1855, the mills around Batley and Dewsbury were grinding through 30 million pounds of rags per year. By 1873, Batley alone had between 50 and 60 shoddy and mungo mills. The Heavy Woollen District, as it became known, was clothing armies, furnishing blankets, and supplying the growing working class of Victorian Britain — almost entirely from material that already existed.

When Historic England listed twelve Dewsbury mill buildings for protection in 2023, they described the town as the 19th century's greenest. They were right. Two hundred years before the word circular economy entered the sustainability lexicon, Dewsbury had built one.

What shoddy and mungo actually are.

Both are forms of recycled wool yarn. The distinction between them is about the source material and the resulting fibre quality.

Shoddy comes from soft wool rags — loose weaves, knitted garments, softer fabrics. These are easier to pull apart mechanically, and the resulting fibres, while shorter than virgin wool, retain reasonable quality. Shoddy was used for blankets, low-cost suiting, army uniforms.

Mungo comes from harder rags — densely woven coats, felted wool, tailors' clippings. More aggressive machinery was needed to liberate the fibres, and the result was a finer but shorter staple. Both could be blended with virgin wool to improve strength and spinning performance.

The process has remained fundamentally unchanged in two centuries. Rags are collected, sorted by fibre type and colour, stripped of buttons, zips, labels and linings, then fed through a pulling machine — a system of rotating rollers set with metal pins that tease the fabric apart into individual fibres. Those fibres are carded to align and clean them, then spun into new yarn, often blended with a percentage of virgin wool to compensate for the shorter fibre length that results from mechanical processing.

The key word throughout is wool. This works because wool is a protein fibre — chemically similar across its many varieties, mechanically resilient enough to survive the pulling process without completely degrading. The industry tried the same process with cotton rags in parallel, and while it worked to a degree, the resulting shoddy cotton was significantly lower quality and more limited in application.

Why wool is uniquely recyclable.

No other commonly used textile fibre has wool's end-of-life profile. It is the only material for which a genuine closed-loop recycling system has operated at commercial scale for over two centuries.

The reasons are structural. Wool fibres are long relative to cotton or recycled polyester staple — which means they survive mechanical pulling with enough length remaining to be spun again. Wool is a natural protein, meaning it degrades properly in aerobic conditions — unlike synthetic fibres, which fragment into microplastics, and unlike cotton in landfill, which produces methane through anaerobic digestion. And wool's natural crimp and scale structure allows fibres to bind together in spinning without the same degree of chemical treatment that other recycled fibres require.

There is also the question of what wool does before it reaches end of life. It is naturally antibacterial, which means it can be worn multiple times between washes — reducing water and energy use over the garment's life. It regulates temperature, reducing the need for synthetic insulation layers. And because quality wool is durable, garments last significantly longer than their fast fashion equivalents, reducing the frequency of replacement.

The sustainability argument for wool is most convincing when you look at the whole life cycle rather than just the production stage. At production, wool has genuine environmental costs — land use, methane from sheep, water for processing. But at end of life, it has something almost no other fibre has: a real, functioning recycling infrastructure.

Who is doing this in the UK today.

The honest answer is: almost nobody, and one person in particular.

Dr John Parkinson has worked in wool and cashmere recycling since 1977. His father worked in the trade before him. He founded a recycling business called Evergreen in 1990 — the first of its kind in the UK — which eventually closed as the domestic woollen industry contracted. He watched the skills and machinery disappear. In 2019, alarmed that no traditional wool recycler remained operational in the UK, he founded iinouiio — an acronym for It Is Never Over Until It Is Over.

Iinouiio is now based within the Camira Yarns facility in Birkby, Huddersfield, having received a majority investment from the Camira Group and £165,000 in WRAP funding for new processing machinery. It is the only facility of its kind currently operating in the UK — the last of the many hundreds that once defined an entire regional economy.

The process at iinouiio is the same one Benjamin Law developed, but modernised. Wool and cashmere garments — both pre-consumer manufacturing waste and post-consumer clothing returned by brands and individuals — are sorted, cleaned, pulled, carded and spun into new fibre, yarn and fabric. The output is genuinely high quality — not the coarse shoddy of 19th century army blankets, but fibre capable of being used in premium applications.

Finisterre, the Cornish outdoor brand, partnered with iinouiio in 2024 to create a capsule collection from returned end-of-life Finisterre wool products — a genuine closed loop for a brand's own garments. Dr Parkinson noted that working with smaller brands has been more rewarding than with larger ones: the decision-making is faster, the commitment to UK manufacturing is genuine, and the willingness to adapt manufacturing processes for reclaimed materials is real.

What this means practically.

If you have old wool knitwear — jumpers, scarves, blankets, cardigans — these are among the most valuable textile waste streams in the UK. A pure wool jumper that reaches iinouiio or a comparable recycling stream will most likely become new yarn. That is a closed loop. It is rare in textiles and worth knowing about.

Some practical guidance:

**For wearable wool items in good condition** — donate to TRAID, Oxfam, or specialist vintage and preloved shops. Good quality wool garments resell well and can have a long second life before recycling becomes necessary.

**For worn out but pure wool items** — these are best directed to textile recyclers. TRAID accepts all textiles and has routes into recycling streams. Oxfam accepts worn items. If you have significant quantities of pure wool — from a clear-out, an estate, or a wardrobe edit — it is worth contacting iinouiio or checking WRAP's textile recycling database, which maps over 200 sorters and recyclers across the UK and Europe.

**The blending problem** — most modern knitwear is not pure wool. A typical high street jumper labelled wool is often 50% acrylic, or 80% wool with polyamide, or a dozen other combinations. Blended fibres complicate recycling significantly. The mechanical pulling process works on wool — the acrylic content comes out as mixed, degraded fibre that cannot be respun cleanly. If you care about recyclability, check the label. 100% wool is the feedstock the recycling industry needs.

The bigger picture.

The shoddy and mungo industry of Victorian Yorkshire produced something that the modern sustainable fashion industry is still struggling to replicate at scale: a functioning, economically viable system for turning discarded textiles into new ones.

It worked because wool is a forgiving fibre, because the processing is mechanical rather than chemical, and because the industry had 200 years to develop infrastructure, skills and market routes. Rebuilding equivalent infrastructure for cotton, polyester and the blended fabrics that make up most of what we wear today is genuinely hard. The chemistry is more complex, the investment required is larger, and the economic incentives are currently weaker than for virgin production.

But wool shows it is possible. One fibre, one region, two centuries of continuous operation. The knowledge has nearly been lost — a handful of ageing practitioners, one functioning mill in Huddersfield, a single founding investment from WRAP keeping the capability alive.

It would be worth not losing it again.

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*If you have old wool items to recycle, WRAP's textile recycling database is at wrap.ngo. For brand partnerships and take-back schemes involving wool and cashmere, iinouiio can be contacted at iinouiio.co.uk.*

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