Challenges & Sustainability

• Natural Dyeing & Wool Processing are somewhat of a niche industry; how did your involvement with the topic come about? How did you identify the need, and how did you manage to make it sustainable through your activities?

Founded in 2011, SABER FAZER is an initiative coordinated by Alice Bernardo and Miguel Barbot, dedicated to researching, enhancing and disseminating artisanal and semi-industrial production techniques in Portugal, with a focus on natural textile fibres and farm-to-cloth productions.

We are an educational and editorial project whose main objective is to ensure the transfer of technical knowledge and to educate and raise awareness of the fundamental issues surrounding this topic, which are not only those of environmental sustainability, but also social and economic sustainability.

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Smaller, local production scales are becoming increasingly important, and there is an urgent need to renew and disseminate the knowledge that makes it possible to create sustainable production and collaboration chains. Our work focuses on local genetic resources and sustainable small and medium-scale production processes. We spent the last decade exploring the topics of wool and natural dyeing, and have a deep knowledge of the needs in these areas.

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• What is Natural Dyeing, and why is it more sustainable than other processes?

Fibre and textile production are among the most significant factors responsible for the current climate crisis, and industrial dyeing is a huge environmental problem. 

The transition to more sustainable practices in fashion and textiles will necessarily include a significant change in the way we dye our fibres and cloth. 

Over thousands of years, communities worldwide have discovered and developed different methods of extracting and fixing colours, taking advantage of local biodiversity. Natural dyeing requires in-depth knowledge of the available flora and of the dyeing processes, which involve preparing the fabrics, extracting the colourants, dyeing and finishing the textiles. It is a complex process and a topic we have been researching and producing technical knowledge for many years now.

• What is the biggest challenge with Wool Processing?

Due to little added value being created in Europe, the wool sector has been slowly dismantled. This dismantling begins in the farm, jeopardising the diversity and unique characteristics of indigenous breeds and their importance for agro-ecological systems, which depend on a balance between extensive agricultural practices and the natural regenerative processes of soils, and ending in cities and territories where this industry was established and was one of the primary sources of prosperity.

This dismantling completely degraded the value chain, particularly at the smaller scales, from sheep production to wool and all the following processes. This has an immediate impact on the shearing, which is no longer done in order to guarantee the quality of the raw material; in washing, where there are few or no small and medium-scale washers open to producers; and also in fibre preparation (carding and combing) and spinning and felting, areas with an extreme potential for value creation and in which there is practically no technology installed to processing with quality and productivity.

Therefore, the sector’s recovery depends on creating a “new wool value chain”, with urgent research and knowledge creation that allows the design of productive structures with a sustainable scale, adapted to the technical and environmental requirements of the 21st century. The relevance of this idea is supported by the existence of many interested parties in these fields, and there are movements of wool enthusiasts with great entrepreneurial potential, both in cities and rural areas. However, the difficulty in accessing knowledge and technology means that they are limited to hobbies that do not materialise in creating competitive businesses with growth potential.

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