OEKO-TEX, GOTS, Sustainability, and Mulesing

OEKO-TEX

OEKO-TEX is an organization that evaluates textiles based on whether they contain chemicals and other substances that could potentially harm human health and/or the environment. There are  three primary OEKO-TEX labels: Standard 100, Made in Green, and Organic Cotton. OEKO-TEX Standard 100 is the most general, and it’s the one you’re most likely to encounter as a consumer. In order to acquire this certification, the textile in question is tested for over one thousand chemicals and other harmful substances. If the presence of any of these substances exceeds OEKO-TEX’s maximum acceptable standard, the textile cannot be OEKO-TEX certified. Keep in mind, though, that the Standard 100 certification does not deal with the production process or the supply chain—it’s all about the finished product, not how the yarn was made. For more information on OEKO-TEX and OEKO-TEX labels, check out their website.

GOTS

The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) is more focused on the full production process—every step of the supply chain has to meet GOTS criteria in order for the finished product to be certified. The GOTS label comes in two grades: “Made with Organic Materials” means that the textile in question contains a minimum of 70% organic fiber, and the label “Organic” raises that minimum to 95%. GOTS also maintains strict chemical, environmental, human rights, and fair labor standards. If you want to read more, you can find the GOTS website here.

Sustainability

While the OEKO-TEX and GOTS labels are great ways for consumers to confirm the environmental criteria met by a given textile, lots of yarns are held to a high standard of sustainability but do not have these certifications. Getting certified can be expensive and thus inaccessible to some producers, particularly small farms. Even if a yarn does not carry a GOTS or OEKO-TEX label, its production process may still be extremely sustainable, ethical, and traceable—company websites can be a great source of information on this topic, as many provide very transparent information about how a given brand’s yarn is made, what’s in it, and where it comes from.

Mulesing

What is mulesing?
Mulesing is a surgical procedure performed on young sheep to prevent blowfly infestations. Sheep, and in particular merino sheep, have dense folds of skin around their anuses, and in parts of the world where blowflies are common this leaves them extremely vulnerable to flystrike. Blowflies lay their eggs in these folds, and when the eggs hatch the larvae burrow into the skin. This is extremely painful for the sheep, and it can lead to life-threatening infections. To prevent flystrike, these folds of skin are sometimes cut away in young sheep, in a process referred to as “mulesing.” This protects sheep from blowflies, but it is also often done without proper equipment, methods, and wound treatment, and the sheep are frequently given no form of pain relief. This is a thorny issue: flystrike is very dangerous and painful, but mulesing is a cruel solution. There are ways to work around the problem, though, and in many parts of the world mulesing is not done at all.

Where is mulesing practiced?
Mulesing is now almost exclusively confined to Australia, where flystrike is most common. In South America, it is completely unnecessary because the climate is not favorable to blowflies. In South Africa and New Zealand, it is illegal. In North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom, it is not practiced. However, this doesn’t mean that all Australian wool, or even all Australian merino wool, is mulesed—some Australian farmers avoid the process through pesticides and/or very frequent shearing around the sheep’s anuses, and others use anesthetics to make the process less painful for the animals. Of course, the use of pesticides presents a whole host of other controversies, and preventing flystrike through shearing is very expensive and not always sustainable for small farms. The only proposed permanent solution to mulesing is more careful breeding to decrease the density of Australian merino sheep’s skin folds over time. 

How can you know if your yarn is mulesing-free?
If your yarn comes from sheep outside of Australia, it is almost certainly mulesing-free. If it is not merino it is probably also mulesing-free. (And, of course, if your yarn is not made from sheep’s wool, it is definitely not mulesed!) Many yarn companies specify on their websites or on Ravelry that their yarn comes from non-mulesed sheep—typically, this information can be found in company bios and FAQs, or on specific product pages. We have done our best to figure out which of our yarns are mulesing-free and to label them accordingly, but that doesn’t mean that the yarns that aren’t labeled as “mulesing-free” necessarily come from mulesed sheep! Very small companies, including many hand-dyers, often source their bases from large manufacturers, and detailed accounts of where that yarn comes from and how it is being produced are not always readily available.