The benefits of alpaca wool for sustainability

This is a sponsored article from SustainabilityTracker.com member Snooze.

Look out wool, Alpaca has arrived and there’s plenty to love about this sustainable wonder-fibre. Soft and strong, light and warm alpaca fleece is simply extraordinary.

It’s highly insulative while being lightweight. It’s biodegradable, eco-friendly and hypoallergenic. Alpaca fleece doesn’t contain lanolin so it doesn’t need to be chemically cleaned after it’s harvested, making it an all-round more suitable option for people with sensitivities to wool and a gentler choice for the environment. It’s hard to imagine how much care goes into making each of our Alpaca quilts, so we’ll give you a sneak peek of the process from harvesting the fleece to the finished product.

Step 1 – Shearing the Alpacas

Alpacas are easy to love. With their curious eyes and gentle nature, these beautiful animals are alert and inquisitive. The first step in making our Snooze Alpaca quilt is harvesting the fleece. All of the fleece used in our quilts come from Australian farms. Typically, in Australia, alpacas are shorn each November, to coincide with Spring.  After harvesting the fleece, the process of getting the raw fibre ready for the quilt begins.

Things you may not know about Alpacas:

• Alpacas predominantly eat grass and enjoy a mainly vegetarian diet
• Thanks to their padded feet alpacas cause less disruption to the surface of the soil and are not as likely to damage root systems, making regrowth easier
• Alpacas are very efficient eaters and have a relatively lower impact on the land when compared with sheep
• Alpaca waste can be used as fertilizer
• Alpacas are typically shorn just once a year, in Spring
• It takes a shearer approximately 2 hours to shear 20 alpacas
• Each time an alpaca is shorn, it produces around 4kg of fibre

Step 2 – Sorting the harvested alpaca fleece

After the raw fleece is harvested it’s sorted by an expert Alpaca Grader. The fleece is classified according to the raw fibre’s length, colour and diameter. When this process is complete, the sorted fibre is compressed into bales and sent for cleaning.

Step 3 – Washing and cleaning the alpaca fleece

Once the sorted fibre has arrived at the next facility it is cleaned thoroughly to remove any debris or impurities. Alpaca fleece doesn’t contain lanolin, so no chemical cleaning is required. The absence of lanolin and chemical cleaning is generally what makes alpaca a more suitable choice for people with wool sensitivity. After the fleece has been cleaned, it’s repacked into bales to be sold.

Step 4 – Loosening the fibre with the Hopper

The Snooze Alpaca quilt uses only premium, superfine-grade Australian white alpaca fleece. During the next step in crafting our quilt, the compressed bales of fibre are put through a machine called a Hopper to loosen them up. This is in preparation for the next step where they will be loosened further and combed into fine, even sheets of alpaca fleece.

Step 5 – Creating delicate sheets of fibre with the Carding Line Machine

It’s at this step we can really start to see our quilt emerging. The Carding Line Machine is made up of a large roller surrounded by small rollers, combined with a comb-like attachment to smooth and even the fibres and remove any last impurities. The fibres are then divided and redivided to create fine sheets of parallel fibres, then layered to ensure there is consistent warmth and quality across the whole quilt.

Step 6 – Quilting the layers together

A classic quilting technique is then used to join and evenly distribute the superfine layers of web-like alpaca fleece. Quilting helps provide structure and fixes the sheets of fibre evenly in place ready to be covered.

Step 7 – Applying a cover to the fibres to make the quilt

Applying a beautiful dobby stripe cover to the Alpaca quilt is the penultimate step to the finished article. Made from 100% cotton sateen, each quilt cover is expertly stitched by our friends at Bambi and finished with a double border.

Step 7 – Boxed and ready for our stores

The finished quilts are lovingly folded into our FSC-certified, recyclable packaging ready to be transported to our stores. Once you understand the purity and simplicity of the process taken to create it, it seems natural that this gorgeous, sustainably-made, luxurious Snooze Alpaca Quilt will be on everyone’s wish list this winter.

Article References: 

Live Science – Facts About Alpacas

Your Sustainable Guide – What is Alpaca Wool? Is it Really Sustainable?

Australian Alpaca Association – Alpaca Fleece Processing

This is an article from a SustainabilityTracker.com Member. The views and opinions we express here don’t necessarily reflect our organisation.