ReWOOLVE · Regenerating Coarse Wool Waste Via Green Electrospinning Toward Peptide-Informed Soft Keratin Fiber Mats

The textile industry is an essential sector of global importance. However, it is environmentally damaging, especially synthetic fibers. Even natural fibers such as cotton, used in half of all textiles, also require intensive land, water, and pesticide use. In response to these challenges, there is an urgent need for sustainable alternatives, particularly those that repurpose natural fiber waste. One such overlooked resource is coarse wool, a keratin-rich by-product of the meat and dairy industries, often discarded for its rigidity and low spinnability despite valuable traits such as disulphide crosslinking, flame retardancy, and barrier performance. A promising path forward is the regeneration of coarse wool into soft, functional keratin fiber mats. Although keratin, like synthetic polyamides, contains amide groups, it is biodegradable, and its hydrogen-bonded structure can be disrupted by solvents such as NMMO. Yet, a relevant process has never been applied to wool keratin. ReWOOLVE addresses this gap by proposing a peptide-informed design strategy that compares regenerated keratin fibers against well-defined synthetic coiled-coil peptide assemblies, aiming to achieve structural attributes surpassing those of traditional textiles. These peptide motifs serve as a molecular framework for tuning softness, strength, and structural integrity in keratin-based fibers. ReWOOLVE will bridge natural and synthetic strategies to regenerate coarse wool into soft, high-performance keratin non-woven mats by green electrospinning. The project aims to develop uniform, high-performance keratin-based non-woven fiber mats from coarse wool by (i) optimising the dissolution and electrospinning of keratin in green solvents, with NMMO as a reference system based on its industrial use, and (ii) benchmarking regenerated fibers against synthetic coiled-coil peptide assemblies to guide structure–function relationships.