Environmental Impacts

Climate change is one of the largest issues facing the Australian wool industry right now. Food is changing due to the worsening of climate change, and this change in diet for these sheep is impacting the quality of the wool that they produce. When the quality of wool is lowered, it becomes harder to process. To have wool processed correctly, you must have a long, continuous fibre with no breaks. When wool is healthy, it will not break easily, or have any signs of breaks.

Another issue that impacts the quality of our wool is the current dust storms that have become more frequent with climate change. The dust storms stain the sheep’s wool, causing discolouration. The storms also affect the crops, which brings us back to my first point about the diet of these sheep. With the droughts in more rural parts of Australia, there is a lack of water, which is also impacting the quality of our wool. Because of this, the consumption of wool fibre in clothing is decreasing, which is hard on the wool industry.

We need to do everything we can to stop this. We can take action against climate change and stop things like this from happening. The frequent dust storms? That’s not normal. The long droughts? Also not normal. There are many ways we can try to stop this. Our earth is unhealthy, and so many people are just watching it crumble before their very eyes.. If everybody just did a little bit to help, it would make a big difference.

One thing that everyone can do is to recycle. At the moment there is more plastic than ever before entering landfill. This plastic doesn’t break down for hundreds of years and ends up in the oceans and the food we eat. The average person will consume about one credit card’s worth of plastic a week. Not only is that harmful to us, but also to animals and the earth we live on. Everybody just doing this can help. Also cutting back the amounts of non-renewable energy we use and trying to use more public transport to reduce the amount of pollution we are responsible for. Just doing these little things can really help climate change, and in doing so, help our sheep and wool industry.