The Polska Wełna (Polish Wool) initiative was launched earlier this month in the northwestern city of Szczecin.
Founder Ewa Rozkosz says the foundation seeks to promote wool as part of Poland’s cultural and agricultural heritage, support craftspeople and breeders, and advocate legal changes to make the material easier to process, use and sell.
She says around 1,000 tons of sheep’s wool are obtained in Poland every year, but under Polish and European Union rules it is treated as an animal byproduct rather than a valuable raw material.
“This is a versatile material, suitable for sportswear, building materials, and ecological fertilizer,” Rozkosz said at an industry meeting in Szczecin in mid-March. “The market badly needs Polish wool. Textile makers are looking for raw material, but they reach for foreign products, such as wool fabrics from China or yarn from Italy, because ours is not available.”
She added that imported yarn is often cheaper than producing it in Poland, which is why manufacturers buy wool fiber abroad.
In her view, that makes public support and innovation projects involving wool from Polish sheep especially important.
One of the foundation’s main goals is to ease rules for small-scale and hobby use of wool.
Rozkosz told the gathering that under current regulations, even transporting small quantities of raw wool from a breeder to a private home requires professional containers because the material is covered by EU rules on animal byproducts.
She argued that EU law gives member states room to introduce separate national rules, and that Poland could exempt sheep fleece intended for hobby use from some transport and storage requirements.
Without such changes, she said, small-scale spinners are operating in a legal gray zone.
“Minor legislative changes would allow wool to survive in handicrafts,” Rozkosz said at the “Let’s Talk About Polish Sheep and Polish Wool” event.
Maksymilian Perzyński, a veterinary technician, animal science student at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, and founder of the Owce w Polsce (Sheep in Poland) website, said large quantities of wool are currently going to waste.
“Each sheep produces around 3 to 5 kilograms of wool a year,” Perzyński said. “It often ends up in the trash or is stored for years and can no longer be processed, for example into yarn.”
He said sheep must be shorn once or twice a year for health and welfare reasons, but even small farms face strict limits on what they can legally do with the fleece.
He added that the problem extends to using wool as a natural fertilizer, even though processed sheep-based fertilizer products can be legally sold in stores.
The initiative’s supporters say the problem reflects the decline of Poland’s wool industry since the political and economic transformation that began in 1989.
Data from the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture show that Poland now has around 285,000 sheep. In the 1980s, the country had nearly 5 million sheep and produced 17,000 to 18,000 tons of wool a year.
Today, sheep in Poland are bred mainly for meat and milk, including milk used to make oscypek, a traditional smoked cheese from the country’s southern mountain region.
Lamb is exported to Western European countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Italy.
Rozkosz and Perzyński, who have worked together since 2025 on the Polska Wełna project, say wool deserves renewed attention as an economic, cultural and environmental resource. They want spinning added to Poland’s list of intangible cultural heritage, which they say would help protect and sustain the craft.
They also point out that professions tied to wool processing, such as spinner and wool carder, are not recognized in Poland’s craft law. As a result, there is no formal path to qualify as a journeyman or master in those fields.
The foundation says interest in wool is already growing. Rozkosz said the Klub Prządki social media group has more than 2,000 members, while more local initiatives are appearing across the country.
For its backers, the argument is straightforward: Poland still has sheep, still produces wool, and still has people ready to work with it. What is missing, they say, is a system that treats wool as something worth using rather than something to be thrown away.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP