When she was a baby, Derelee Potroz-Smith would often sleep on a bale of wool in the woolshed during the busy shearing season in Taranaki. Like many in rural communities, her family relied on wool for a sizable portion of their income.
But as she got older things changed. “I remember in 1989 the wool clip used to bring in 50% of our family income and then literally overnight, before 1990 came round, it dropped down to 10%. It was very, very depressing.”
But times have since become even harder in New Zealand’s wool industry. Tom O’Sullivan, general manager for advocacy at Campaign for Wool New Zealand, which promotes and provides education on the benefits of wool, notes it now costs farmers about $2.50 a kilo to produce the strong wool that makes up around 80% of the nation’s clip. However, they only receive around $1.50 for the wool, meaning each kilo leaves them about $1 out of pocket.
Potroz-Smith is among those who want to turn the tide of these falling fortunes. The Wellington-based entrepreneur is the CEO and co-founder of Woolchemy, a materials technology company that’s making high-performance technical textiles out of New Zealand strong wool.
While strong wool has traditionally been used to make products like carpet and rugs, Woolchemy is focusing on developing ‘technical textiles’. They’re materials developed for their functional properties and technical performance, prioritising how they work over how they look. Potroz-Smith says it’s a market worth US$200 billion annually and within this, the area Woolchemy is targeting – non-woven textiles used in hygiene products – is one of the fastest-growing sectors.
Potroz-Smith hopes Woolchemy will be able to capture its share of the sector by offering alternatives to the fossil-fuel-derived synthetic materials predominantly used by hygiene product manufacturers – and raise the fortunes of Kiwi sheep farmers along the way.
The company has developed two patented textile technologies made from 100% natural materials: a washable, super-absorbent material called NeweZorb that can absorb more than 10 times its own weight, and NeweFlex, designed to be used as a moisture-wicking layer in disposable hygiene products like nappies, period and incontinence products, and wipes.
“We’re trying to create a constant demand for wool by targeting hygiene because it [disposable synthetic products] is such a huge climatic, environmental issue,” she says. “We’re solving an environmental issue, but we’re also trying to solve an issue for the wool industry and create more jobs.”
An idea is born
The company has its origins after Potroz-Smith herself became a mother in 2008. “That was a big turning point for me because I realised there was a cup of crude oil in every nappy that I was using. And in New Zealand, we use a million disposable nappies a day and they’re going into our landfill.” Conversations about the falling fortunes of the wool industry – and opportunities to turn them around – were common in her family and it was during one of these with her mother, who is a co-founder and director of the company, that the idea behind Woolchemy was sparked.
“I said, ‘Look, if you’re going to solve the wool industry’s woes, what we have to come up with is a product which ideally has a short shelf life that people will still want to buy in a recession – it’s something they need’. And you could just see this ‘aha moment’ and she was like, ‘well, you use a lot of nappies’.”
The pair began developing prototypes at the kitchen bench but the breakthrough came in 2010 when they gained some funding from Beef and Lamb, which was charged with distributing the former Wool Board’s wool levy funds. It allowed them to commission AgResearch to help develop a process that alters the molecular structure of the wool to make it super absorbent. By 2013 they had cracked the formula for NeweZorb – a material capable of instantly absorbing at least 10 times its own weight in moisture and able to sustain more than 100 washes.
The pair’s original idea was to make a 100% biodegradable disposable nappy made from wool but insights into the market forced them to change tack. “When I started visiting conferences in the US, people were like, ‘What are you doing? Are you coming in on our market?’ I could tell it was very, very competitive. So we did a purposeful business model pivot where we thought, okay, we don’t want to come in with a product and then we get squashed by some multi-billion-dollar healthcare company because we’re stepping on their turf.”
They decided to focus instead on becoming an ingredient brand, creating 100% biodegradable wool-based materials that could perform as well, if not better than synthetics, and then offer them as alternatives to healthcare companies. Potroz-Smith likens it to the Gore-Tex model, where the fabric technology is used in a wide range of others’ products.
The reusable nature of NeweZorb made it a natural fit for use in products such as reusable nappy inserts and period underwear, but industry feedback was that there was also demand for single-use products such as period products, disposable nappies, and wipes made from more sustainable and renewable materials.
Research commissioned by the company showed one of the most important layers in the performance of a disposable nappy is what’s called the ‘acquisition distribution layer’ (ADL), which both locks moisture away from the skin and distributes it down to an absorbent core. The insights led Woolchemy to come up with a wool-based ADL material called NeweFlex, initially developed with grant support from the Agricultural and Marketing Research and Development Trust (AGMARDT), which provides funding to explore innovation opportunities in New Zealand’s agricultural sectors. The company has since gained two further grants from the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures (SFF) fund, which it used firstly to prove that NeweFlex could meet the performance requirements for nappy producers, and secondly to trial its viability to be processed through high-speed commercial nappy manufacturing lines.
Circular story
Late last year the company raised $1.5 million in investment, which will allow it to commercialise its materials with customers. Potroz-Smith says Woolchemy expects to have its materials launched in products produced by multinational companies within the next year. The goal is to keep developing new materials made from wool that will ultimately be able to replace other synthetic layers in hygiene products, offering manufacturers more alternatives to fossil-fuel-derived materials. She envisages other technological and agricultural advances that support a more sustainable economy – such as organisations using biodigesters to process consumer waste (and capture energy from that process), and low-methane emitting sheep – will align with Woolchemy’s mission.
Campaign for Wool’s O’Sullivan describes Potroz-Smith as “visionary”, recognising early the growing consumer aspiration to shift away from fossil-fuel-derived synthetics towards products made from biodegradable and renewable resources. Companies like Woolchemy are important in the search for new markets for our wool industry, which despite experiencing “a very brutal last few decades”, he says, holds massive opportunity.
“There will come a point where wool’s back in vogue,” he says. “The day that demand outweighs supply we’ll start to see the price go up for wool. And once it goes back up, I genuinely do think the prospects for sheep farmers and wool are great.”
