page_title: Wool
section_title: Scouring
hierarchical_section_title: Wool / Processing / Scouring
caption_attribution_description: English: Wool before scouring by the Siroscour process (top), and after (bottom)
context_page_description: Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and other animals, including cashmere and mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, hide and fur clothing from bison, angora from rabbits, and other types of wool from camelids.
  Wool consists of protein together with a small percentage of lipids. In this regard it is chemically quite distinct from the more dominant textile, cotton, which is mainly cellulose.
context_section_description: Wool straight off a sheep is known as "raw wool”, “greasy wool" or "wool in the grease". This wool contains a high level of valuable lanolin, as well as the sheep's dead skin and sweat residue, and generally also contains pesticides and vegetable matter from the animal's environment. Before the wool can be used for commercial purposes, it must be scoured, a process of cleaning the greasy wool. Scouring may be as simple as a bath in warm water or as complicated as an industrial process using detergent and alkali in specialized equipment.
  In north west England, special potash pits were constructed to produce potash used in the manufacture of a soft soap for scouring locally produced white wool.
  In commercial wool, vegetable matter is often removed by chemical carbonization. In less-processed wools, vegetable matter may be removed by hand and some of the lanolin left intact through the use of gentler detergents. This semigrease wool can be worked into yarn and knitted into particularly water-resistant mittens or sweaters, such as those of the Aran Island fishermen. Lanolin removed from wool is widely used in cosmetic products, such as hand creams.
caption: Wool before and after scouring
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