Background Coarse wool from EU sheep farming and slaughter is essentially a valueless by-product that cannot be used for textile application. However, since sheep shearing (necessary for the animals' well-being) generates some 200 000 tonnes/yr of coarse wool, there is a significant economic opportunity if the waste material can be valorised Each tonne of raw wool contains approximately 150 kg of lanolin (wool wax), 40 kg of suint (soluble contaminants such as potassium salts from sweat and faeces), 150 kg of dirt (soil), 20 kg of vegetable matter, and residues of insecticides, leaving 640 kg of wool fibre. Insecticides or insect growth regulators (IGR) are used to protect sheep from ecto-parasites (lice, mites, blowfly, etc.); their presence in wool is variable and depends on the permitted legal use pattern in each country. Factory or industrial ‘scouring’ consists of the immersion of the greasy wool in a series of baths of warm water (about 50°C), soap and sodium hydroxide (soda) or potassium hydroxide (potash) and is one of the recommended procedures for eliminating the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus present in the wool. The effluent discharged from wool scouring contains high concentrations of the following: soil particles picked up by the sheep during grazing; lanolin and sweat (the source of potassium) produced by the sheep; additives used in the scouring and related processes such as detergent residues; and pesticide residues. The resulting chemical oxygen demand (COD) reaches 100 000 mg/l and the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) varies from 20 000 to 40 000 mg/l. This makes the disposal of the sludge generated by the effluent treatment very difficult to manage. Objectives The overall objective of the GREENWOOLF project is to demonstrate the viability of converting waste wool into fertiliser using small-scale, local hydrolysis plants. The process will reduce transportation costs and eliminate the need for the scouring and disposal of the coarse wool. Specific goals are: To convert the unusable, greasy wool into an effective soil conditioner fertiliser using a pilot unit, specially designed and built to cope with one-third of the annual wool shearing of the Piedmont region (1 tonne/day); and To demonstrate that unusable coarse wools, which represent a by-product estimated at more than 150 million tonnes/yr (about 75% of the greasy wool shorn annually), can be recycled, without any preliminary scouring treatment, into a added-value green material, with benefits for the environment and profit for the EU livestock sector. Expected results: The project expects to achieve the following results: A demonstration that wool waste can be 100% recycled into organic fertiliser using a "green hydrolysis process" with no use of dangerous chemicals; and The development of an economically-sustainable management model that takes into account the sheep population and density distribution in the Piedmont region in order to optimise plant size and the added value of the fertiliser produced.