Welcome to this public session of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. This is our fourth innovation showcase session and I am very pleased to welcome Woolcool, our innovators this week. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators, and what more can be done; so, to inform our work, each week a member of the Committee takes a turn at selecting an innovator to share their story, before our main evidence session. Allison Gardner is this week’s member, so I ask her to introduce today’s innovator.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Angela Morris and I am the CEO and founder of Woolcool. Thank you for having us both today. What is Woolcool? Woolcool creates innovative insulating packaging solutions, using natural, sustainable, biodegradable, recyclable and renewable materials. Woolcool is designed and manufactured in the UK, using 100% pure sheep wool. Woolcool is used globally, for shipping time/temperature-sensitive products across the globe for the pharmaceutical and food sectors. Woolcool is a second-generation B Corp accredited family business and a two-time Queen’s Award for Enterprise winner, in innovation and sustainable development. We employ 70 local Staffordshire people, which can increase to 100 during peak seasons. The company now has a multimillion-pound turnover in the business-to-business world of insulated packaging. We are an active exporter to Europe, the US and further afield. So, where did Woolcool come from? As with many innovations, it was born out of a crisis—the foot and mouth epidemic of 2001, which I am sure we all remember. In 2001 the National Trust launched its Farming Forward initiative, to support farmers who were badly affected and help them diversify. In 2002 I was engaged as a packaging consultant to the National Trust, and was asked if I could design a box that would allow farmers to send their meat products direct to consumers in their home. It was a bit of a challenge, because they wanted to use completely sustainable materials, and over 20 years ago there were not a lot of opportunities to find something natural. Today, our product range consists of insulated pouches and boxes for both food and pharmaceuticals. The innovations for the pharmaceutical industry include our patented LifeGuardian 150-hour box, which means that products keep to a temperature of between 2° and 8° for 150 hours, through the use of Woolcool. I do not think that any other material that we trialled can do that. There is also our FreightGuardian pallet cover, for bulk shipments. I hope that gives you an overview and that you can see how Woolcool has developed—and why.

Thank you.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for inviting us here today. I would like to talk a bit about our strategy and some of the challenges that we have faced. Despite the historical reliance of the UK economy on wool, Woolcool faced a major challenge to re-establish its credibility. That is mainly due to the indiscriminate use of unsustainable materials—particularly plastic packaging in the form of polystyrene—over the last century. Our strategy, therefore, has included not only the traditional commercial routes to market but also re-education, combined with scientific proof, as to the amazing natural properties of wool. We have been collaborating with British universities to find this scientific proof—and particularly with the University of Cambridge, the University of Leeds, and Bangor University. Woolcool also won funding from the Government, through Innovate UK, enabling our patented LifeGuardian and FreightGuardian solutions to be developed for the global pharmaceutical sector, as you have just seen on Angela’s slide. This, together with the strongly emerging external sustainability and environmental drivers, has helped Woolcool on its journey towards greater credibility for natural materials in packaging. What future challenges do we face? On the one hand, the UK Government actively encourage and support innovation in natural materials—which we wholeheartedly support. But we now face the possibility, with the proposed new recycling tax, RAM—an extension of EPR—of discrimination against wool. Despite its officially certified compostability, circularity and carbon footprint, wool may nevertheless fall into the red category, as shown on the screen: “Challenging to recycle, often due to problematic materials or designs.” We have all the accreditations for compostabity that you could wish to have, as you can see at the bottom of the screen: EcoVadis, DIN CERTCO, etc. We even carried out an extensive trial in Ireland to assess the compostability of wool in domestic waste collection. It has proved to be perfectly acceptable for it to go in the brown bin. So it is a bit of a challenge for us. What would the potential societal and environmental impacts be, if wool were to fall into the red category? Should the intended RAM packaging tax be implemented, and wool be classified in the red category under “other” packaging materials, this may— unintentionally, we believe—render Woolcool insulated packaging products uncompetitive in the packaging sector. Woolcool uses the equivalent of 25% of the total British wool clip. That amounts to approximately 5 million kilos of coarse wool every year. That is a lot of wool. Since inception, approximately 40 million kilos of plastic packaging—particularly EPS, expanded polystyrene—has been saved from landfill because of customers switching to Woolcool insulated packaging. A decline in coarse wool sales would have economic, industrial and environmental consequences for the British wool industry. Farmers, processors and packaging manufacturers would all feel the impact. We ask the UK Government to seriously address the potential harm that the intended RAM packaging tax may cause to the future use of sustainable, natural materials in favour of those unsustainable oil-based plastic derivatives that the world is trying to reduce. Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you for your presentation. I think we have all learned something about wool and the challenges of the current regulatory environment. Thank you for joining us.