In Carbonfact customers’ product data, wool regularly represents just 1-10% of a product's weight while driving 35-50% of its total emissions. Over 75% of that impact comes from the sheep themselves: methane from enteric fermentation and nitrous oxide from manure, before the fiber ever reaches a mill.
That imbalance is exactly why the underlying farm data matters so much. Zentera Wool Company, formerly The New Zealand Merino Company, is the organization behind the ZQ certification and ZQ+. Zentera works with over 800 growers across New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, connecting high-quality wool grown with care for animals, people, and land with global brand and supply chain partners.
Carbonfact and Zentera have completed a full life-cycle assessment (LCA) of ZQ+ greasy wool, built entirely on primary data collected directly from 28 ZQ+ farms.
ZQ+ greasy wool comes from farms that meet Zentera's animal-welfare and traceability standard (wool is tracked back to the specific farms it came from), plus additional regenerative agriculture requirements covering soil health, biodiversity, and greenhouse gas sequestration.
Greasy wool is raw wool as it comes off the sheep, still carrying lanolin (a waxy, waterproofing substance sheep secrete), dirt, and vegetable matter, before washing or any further processing. It is the earliest point in the supply chain where a wool footprint can be measured, ahead of variation added later by different washing or spinning facilities.
Brands that use ZQ+ wool are supporting growers to use regenerative agriculture practices to maintain and enhance the environment in which the wool is grown.
The LCA for ZQ+ was built by Carbonfact's science team and Zentera based on data across three pillars:
Primary farm data: operational data collected directly from 28 ZQ+ farms in New Zealand and Australia, over two production years (2023–2025), representing a total of 43 farm-years.
Internationally recognized methods: a cradle-to-farm-gate LCA using IPCC 2019 Refinement for on-farm emissions, ecoinvent 3.12 for background data, and the PEF / EF 3.1 method across 16 impact categories, modeled in the open-source Brightway framework.
Full impact transparency: a methodological report documenting how the data was collected, how the inventory was built, including which assumptions and emission factors were applied, and how results were calculated and interpreted.
Carbonfact for Suppliers is the industry's first public environmental-data exchange platform connecting brands and suppliers through verified, comparable impact data. Suppliers can host LCAs with full control over who sees what, while brands can browse materials and request access instantly.
Zentera Wool Company has joined the Carbonfact for Suppliers network to make its ZQ+ wool LCA data accessible to apparel and footwear brands working to reduce product-level emissions. Brands can now explore Zentera's ZQ+ wool and request environmental data in just a few clicks.
Carbonfact's science team reviews all LCAs on the platform to ensure methodological consistency and comparability. This allows brands to assess materials using aligned metrics and make more informed sourcing decisions.
A supplier-specific emission factor. Brands can now replace generic industry proxies with a real, primary-data footprint for ZQ+ wool in their product footprints and Scope 3 supply-chain reporting.
Defensible and transparent footprint. Every figure is backed by documented methodology aligned with PEF, ISO 14040/14044, and IPCC guidance, the kind of audit trail that holds up under CSRD or third-party verification.
Insight into what drives impact. Understanding the main contributors to the footprint at the farm level gives sustainability teams a concrete basis for sourcing decisions and supplier-engagement conversations, rather than a single generic number to work around.
"Having an LCA specific to ZQ+ wool is an exciting step for Zentera as we continue to support our brand partners' goals and bolster the credibility of ZQ+ wool."
– Henry Tallott, General Manager, Integrity Systems, Zentera Wool Company.