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The Experience of CCMI in Cashmere Testing

Unione Industriale Pratese

Kashmir: andamento del mercato e tutela del prodotto

19 gennaio 2007
Auditorium della Cultura e dell'Economia
Palazzo dell'Industria, via Valentini 14 - Prato

L'Esperienza del CCMI nel Controllo dei Capi con Fibre Nobili

When CCMI was founded in 1984 the issue which was foremost on the minds of the then weavers of cashmere, camel hair and blend fabrics in the US was the mislabeling of garments purporting to contain high percentages of cashmere or camel hair fabric. At that time the problem was centered around men’s and ladies’ overcoats and tailored clothing. A typical man’s overcoat might be labeled 92% camel hair, 8% nylon but, in fact, contained a blend of recycled wool and nylon with a very small proportion of fine animal hair which was more than likely recycled. As you can well imagine this was a very great concern to the legitimate weavers of cashmere and camel hair fabrics.

At that time mislabeling was relatively unknown in knitted garments because cashmere and camel hair were still luxury, very high quality niche market products.

CCMI began testing these woven garments that were found in numerous retail outlets in the United States. Very shortly we learned we had a problem in the testing community. There were one or two laboratories in the United States whose results correlated with well-known European laboratories who were involved with the International Wool Textile Organisation and were clearly knowledgeable in fine animal hair testing. Other US laboratories, while well-versed in standard textile testing technology, were ignorant of the science of identifying fine animal hair and distinguishing it from wool. Furthermore they had no practical experience. The laboratories rubber-stamped the representations made by garment suppliers, contributing to the problems and headaches confronted by CCMI in unraveling the problem of mislabeled fabrics and garments.

The dean of the science of fiber analysts in the US at that time was Dr. Samuel Golub who was associated with the Albany International Research Laboratories of Dedham, Massachusetts. Dr. Golub had long experience in the science and technology of fiber identification by light microscopy and also drew on the works of Harry Appleyard, from the United Kingdom. CCMI was fortunate to draw on the work of Dr. Golub in several instances proving mislabeling against US retailers and garment manufacturers. This put those testing laboratories who were honest on alert that they would have to upgrade their skills in identifying wool and fine animal hair or leave that testing to those who were competent to do so. Albany International Research Laboratories also did extensive work with the scanning electron microscope, and was the only laboratory in the US to do so with reference to wool and fine animal hair.

Dr. Golub and his colleagues were in contact with Prof. Franz Josef Wortmann, who was then with the Deutsches Wollforschungsinstitut, and other members of the team, which developed the Scanning Electron Microscopic method for distinguishing wool and fine animal hair. CCMI was also in close contact with those developments. At the same time CCMI, under the leadership of its United Kingdom members, Dawson International, Johnstons of Elgin, and Z. Hinchliffe & Sons, worked closely with the British Textile Technology Group on the development of a technique for identifying and distinguishing different animal hair fibers by the use of DNA. As we know, this method achieved practical fruition in the qualitative analysis of fibers and detection of contamination. However, to this day we are on the cusp of accomplishing quantification of fine animal hair blends by DNA extraction and analysis.

Producers of legitimate woven cashmere, camel hair and blend fabrics are still vexed by unfair competition from cheap mislabeled fabrics, primarily produced on the carded system, some even containing recycled wool, and mislabeled as to both wool and man-made fiber content. Our successes in such cases as the voluntary recall of ladies outwear coats by the German retailer, Peek & Cloppenburg, simply points to the on-going dimensions of this problem.

However, in the last ten or fifteen years a new dimension to the fine animal hair mislabeling problem has manifested its self in very strong terms. The problem of mislabeling in knitwear has come on with the entry of China into the cashmere garment market. When the production of cashmere yarn was confined to a relatively few very high quality spinners, primarily in Europe and Japan, and these spinners knew well their sources of supply and the quality of the raw material, the consumer could shop for cashmere knitwear with a reasonable degree of assurance as to the product he or she was getting. With the huge upsurge of garment production from China, compounded by the 2005 removal of quotas for cashmere knitwear and all other textile products, there has as everyone knows, been a tremendous influx of cheap cashmere knit-wear in the US, European and Japanese markets. Prices for some of these garments are unheard of, £20 from a supermarket in the United Kingdom and $59 at a discount chain in the US. These are not your grandmother’s cashmere jumpers, investment products that lasted a lifetime and got better with reasonable care. They are light, loosely knit, poorly constructed of short length, high micron thickness cashmere, if in fact they are cashmere and not some percentage of sheep’s wool. Obviously we have a certain amount of knowledge about the supply of cashmere fiber in the world and we must ask ourselves if the number of garments on sale in China, the Western markets and Japan, labeled cashmere, comports with worldwide raw material, as we know it. The answer points to the inevitable conclusion that other goat fibers, particularly from Central Asia and Siberia, and wool can be found throughout the production chain for lower priced knitwear. Wool may have been chemically altered to make it more difficult to distinguish from cashmere. Fine micron wool produced by a Chinese native sheep, which some in China have the unmitigated gall and effrontery to call “sheep cashmere”, is unfortunately painful and hard to distinguish by light microscopy. All of these products present challenges to the qualified laboratories able to identify these fibers.

In 2005, twenty-eight testing laboratories from around the world agreed to participate in a CCMI sponsored “round trial” to ascertain their accuracy in detecting the quantity of fine animal hair present in six fiber or yarn samples of known composition. We tabulated the results, sample-by-sample, lab-by-lab, and, for the purposes of this analysis, assigned a “pass” or “fail” grade based on correct identification within three percentage points. This is say, for a fiber present as 50% of the total fiber composition, a lab reporting from 47% to 53% was deemed as having passed the test. The three percentage point tolerance was selected because it is the tolerance permitted under the U.S. Textile Products Labeling Act.

Twenty-four labs used light microscopy (LM) exclusively. Two labs used the scanning electron microscope (SEM) exclusively. One lab reported using BIO testing. And one lab used LM for sample 6 and DNA for the balance of the testing.

Three labs using LM correctly identified all six samples. Four labs using LM correctly identified five of the six samples.

The four worst performing labs were one using LM that failed to correctly identify any of the samples and three using LM that each correctly identified only one of the six samples.

Sample 1 contained 80% cashmere and 20% wool. Thirteen of 28 labs correctly (within the 3% tolerance) identified the fiber composition. Of the 15 failing labs, five were off by ten or more percentage points.

Sample 2 contained 50% cashmere and 50% wool. Twelve of the labs correctly identified the fiber content of this sample. Of the 16 that failed this test, 11 were off by ten or more percentage points.

Sample 3 contained 100% cashmere. Twenty-three labs correctly identified the fiber content of this sample. Of the five that failed, two were off by ten or more percentage points.

Sample 4 contained 100% yak. Seven of the 28 labs correctly identified the fiber content. Of the 21 labs that failed on sample 4, 16 were off by ten or more percentage points. Nineteen incorrectly reported the presence of wool. Other fibers incorrectly identified as being present were: cashmere (5 labs), camel hair (4 labs) and mohair (one lab).

Sample 5 contained 100% yak. Twenty-four of the 28 labs correctly identified the fiber content. Of the four that failed to correctly identify this sample, three were off by ten or more percentage points. Four labs incorrectly identified the presence of cashmere in quantities ranging from 4% to 100%. One lab also incorrectly reported the presence of wool (80%) and one incorrectly reported the presence of camel hair (96%).

Sample 6 contained 10% cashmere and 90% wool. Thirteen of the 28 labs correctly identified the fiber content. Of the 15 labs that failed to correctly identify this sample, three were off by ten or more percentage points.

We observe that the labs did the best (24 passing) with sample 5, which was 100% yak. However, sample 4, which was also 100% proved the most challenging, with merely seven of the labs passing and many of the labs incorrectly identifying wool, cashmere, and camel hair in this sample.

As regards detection of genuine cashmere fiber, we note that the labs did very well at identifying the 100% cashmere sample. Merely five failed (greater than three percentage points off) and of those just two were grossly off (ten or more percentage points off). Cashmere/wool blends, however, presented more of a challenge. Both the high cashmere content blend (80%) and the low cashmere content blend (10%) were incorrectly identified by 15 of the 28 labs.

Technology scrambles to keep up with the resourcefulness of the cheaters but we still rely to a large degree on optical microscopy. We also extensively use scanning electron microscopy particularly here in Europe. DNA testing is being made available not only from the British but also from Japan and several other sources in Europe.  Near infrared spectrography is another technique that is coming to the fore at this time. Also there is the method being sponsored and developed by CCMI with the cooperation of the Italian research laboratory, CNR, which is based on bio-immunological response.

We believe the industry stands on the brink of major technological breakthroughs in identification and quantification of animal fibers using one or a combination of the methods to which I have referred. We believe that objective testing will be simple, accurate and sure and that this will happen within the next twelve months. We believe that cashmere is a valuable brand and a unique luxury product which must be protected from fraud and contamination.

Furthermore, we believe that the world community and the international trading community has awoken to the dangers to our businesses, our markets and our economies from mislabeling, counterfeiting and unfair trade practices of this nature. CCMI will have the support of the international trading community as it continues to fight these unfair practices with evermore-sophisticated technologies at its disposal.

Thank you very much. I look forward to taking your questions.