Spatial Analyses to Assess the Availability of Sheep Wool as Potential Eco-friendly Material

The main objective of this work was to investigate the yearly availability of an agricultural co-product, i.e., sheep wool, suitable as eco-friendly material in building sector. Currently, sheep wool is an agricultural special waste contaminated with impurities, with high disposal costs for breeder, and often illegally disposed (e.g., buried or burned), with a strong environmental impact. On the other hand, by considering the green building sector, sheep wool responds to the requirements of green building components because is an eco-friendly material, a surplus, yearly renewable, and totally recyclable. If used instead of common insulation materials (e.g., fiberglass, rock wool, polyurethane foam, polystyrene), or as reinforcement fibre in bio composite materials, sheep wool offers significant benefits for sustainability such as a reduction for both cost of breeding and environmental pollution. In this study, a Geographical Information System (GIS) - based model to locate and quantify the yearly amount of livestock co-production, i.e., sheep wool, coming from dairy sheep breeding, was put forward and was applied in a study area located in Southern Italy highly characterized by this kind of breeding. The GIS-based model results provided the localization and the quantification of the yearly amount of sheep wool in order to evaluate its availability as new eco-friendly material. Moreover, these results could represent basic information for further analysis of the environmental impact related to the logistics and supply phase of sheep wool to a future collection centre.