Scoured & Carbonised Wool

AWTA was established with the specific purpose of providing an independent testing service to measure the Moisture Content of Scoured & Carbonised Wool for the Australian wool industry.

At that time, Scoured & Carbonised Wool was normally traded on a tel quel basis, with the invoice weight being the mass of wool when weighed at the scour.

This was only indicative of the mass of clean fibre, as it was influenced by the amount of moisture left in the wool when dried after scouring and by any later change in Moisture Content.

When the very first test house was established in Australia by the Central Wool Committee during World War II, exporters of scoured wool soon learnt that there were direct benefits to be obtained if the industry could move away from the tel quel system to a system based on measurements.

However, the CWC laboratories were established only to assist the calibration of valuers for the wartime acquisition programme. Consequently its laboratories were closed down when the war ended.

The exporters petitioned the Government to re-establish an independent test house, leading to the formation of AWTA Ltd in 1957.

Use of an AWTA test for the Moisture Content of the consignment, involving the drying of a random sample, calculation of the Moisture Content of the sample and applying it to the mass of the consignment at the time of sampling provided a fairer basis for orderly trading.

The volume of testing grew rapidly, quadrupling within the first four years and remains as an important part of AWTA Ltd's business to-day, with the highest number of bales sampled occurring in 1993/94. However, the testing regime has changed considerably since 1958, with an increasing use of Yield, rather than Moisture Content testing. Yield testing provides clients with a better measure of the amount of clean wool fibre, as it also takes account of the levels of Vegetable Matter and residual Grease and Dust left after scouring. The most recent change in Scoured & Carbonised Wool testing has been the development of a service for measuring the fibre length after carding. The test will be available at AWTA Ltd in 1998 following the installation of test equipment in the Melbourne laboratory.