What is Eco Cashmere?

An eco cashmere buying guide: what the labels mean, what to look for, and what makes a yarn worth knitting with.

Cashmere is one of the most prized fibers in the world. It is also one of the most environmentally demanding to produce. Over the past decade, the cashmere market has grown sharply across both fashion and craft, and a number of yarns have appeared labeled "eco cashmere," "sustainable cashmere," or "recycled cashmere." The labels are similar. The quality, durability, and environmental impact of the yarns behind them vary considerably.

This guide is for the knitter who wants to understand what those labels mean, and what to look for in a cashmere prized for softness and durability and produced with care for the environment.

The cost of virgin cashmere

Cashmere comes from the soft undercoat of cashmere goats, raised primarily in Mongolia, China, and parts of Central Asia. The fiber is combed or shorn once a year, and each goat produces only 150 to 200 grams of usable fiber per season. It takes the annual yield of four to six goats to make a single lightweight sweater.

The environmental costs of virgin cashmere come from several places. Cashmere goats graze on grasslands and pull plants up by the roots, which damages the soil's ability to regenerate. In Mongolia, where goat populations have grown rapidly to meet global demand, overgrazing has contributed to desertification across traditional pastureland. Processing the raw fiber requires substantial water and energy at every stage: scouring, dehairing, spinning, and finishing. Producing one kilogram of virgin wool fiber generates between 10 and 100 kilograms of CO2 equivalent, depending on the supply chain.

Against this background, recycled cashmere has obvious appeal. The question is what "recycled" means in practice, and how much of the environmental benefit depends on how the recycling is done.

What "eco" really means

"Eco cashmere" is not a regulated term. It is a descriptive label, and any yarn maker can use it. In practice, it usually refers to one of three things:

Recycled cashmere, made partly or entirely from cashmere fibers recovered from pre-consumer mill waste, post-consumer garments, or a combination of both. This is the most common and most verifiable use of the term.
Responsibly sourced virgin cashmere, from farms or cooperatives meeting specific welfare and land management standards. Less common, typically signaled by certifications like the Good Cashmere Standard.
Marketing language without substance, used as a virtue signal with no specific practice or certification behind it.

The difference between the first and the third is significant. A well-made recycled cashmere carries a fraction of the environmental weight of virgin fiber, at equal or better quality. A poorly substantiated "eco" claim delivers neither.

The craft is the difference

The general process of making recycled cashmere is the same everywhere. Collected fiber is sorted, shredded back into loose fiber, blended, and respun. But the quality of the finished yarn depends entirely on how each of those steps is carried out, and by whom. The difference between a good recycled cashmere and a lesser one is almost entirely in the craft.

Sorting is the single most important step. Collected cashmere arrives as mixed garments and waste, in every possible color and condition. Skilled sorters, most of them women, separate the fiber by color, length, grade, and fineness. They identify fiber content by touch. They judge how much usable fiber remains in a garment by the wear patterns. They distinguish pure cashmere from blends, fine fiber from coarse, premium from commodity. This knowledge takes years to build and is largely impossible to automate.

The sorting determines everything downstream. Well-sorted cashmere can be used almost undyed, because the color is already in the fiber. The palette of finished yarns emerges from which shades the sorters have separated and gathered. Poorly sorted cashmere becomes a mixed lot that has to be chemically treated and heavily dyed to produce consistency, which damages the fiber and increases the environmental impact of the finished yarn.

Shredding is the mechanical step where the sorted cloth is broken back down into loose fiber. Done carefully, with the right equipment and slow enough to preserve fiber length, it produces recycled fiber that is close in length to virgin fiber and nearly indistinguishable in the finished yarn. Done aggressively, it shortens the fiber to the point that the resulting yarn pills heavily and loses strength.

Blending restores what the shredding takes away. Because recycled fibers are typically somewhat shorter than virgin fibers, they are blended with additional virgin cashmere, or with another long-fiber material like fine merino, to restore spinnability and resilience. The ratio matters, and the skill of the blender matters. A well-blended yarn feels like cashmere in hand and knits like cashmere on the needles. A poorly blended yarn gives itself away in the first skein.

Spinning is the final step, and it requires expertise in working with recycled fibers specifically. The machinery is similar to virgin-fiber spinning, but the adjustments are different. Mills that have spun recycled fiber for generations have developed knowledge that cannot be reproduced by mills new to the process.

All of these steps can be done well or done poorly. The difference is not always visible in the skein. It is visible in the finished garment three years later.

Why Prato?

The Italian textile district of Prato, twenty kilometers northwest of Florence, has been specializing in regenerated wool and cashmere for more than 150 years. The craft was pioneered there in the mid-1800s by the cenciaioli, the rag workers who built an entire industry around recovering and respinning fiber. Today, roughly 80% of the textiles produced in the district come from regenerated sources. It is the largest center of recycled fiber production in the world, and its mills have accumulated unmatched expertise.

The knowledge in Prato is especially deep around hand-sorting by color and grade, careful shredding, the blending that restores strength, and the spinning adjustments for recycled fiber. Many of the women working the sorting floors today learned the trade from their mothers. The families that own the mills are often in their third or fourth generation of the business. The expertise is embodied in the people and the daily practice.

This matters because recycled cashmere made in Prato is meaningfully different from recycled cashmere made elsewhere. The combination of multi-generational expertise, proximity of specialized workshops, and the infrastructure for sorting and wastewater treatment produces a yarn that reflects the craft of the district. It is a difference of degree, but the degree is significant.

What the Cardato certification guarantees

Cardato Recycled is the certification developed specifically for textiles produced in the Prato district. It is administered by the Chamber of Commerce of Prato and audited by SGS, one of the world's largest independent certification bodies.

To carry the Cardato mark, a yarn must:

Be produced within the Prato textile district, drawing on the district's specific craft expertise
Contain a minimum of 65% regenerated fiber content, higher than most other recycled textile certifications require
Have full life cycle documentation tracking environmental impact across water use, energy use, and chemical inputs, measured against standards set by the Italian Ministry of Ecological Transition
Be subject to annual third-party audit, with re-certification required each year

Cardato is one of the most rigorous regional certifications for recycled textiles in the world. A yarn that carries it has been verified at each stage.

What to look for when buying

A checklist for evaluating eco cashmere yarns:

A named third-party certification. Look for Cardato Recycled, the Global Recycled Standard (GRS), or the Recycled Claim Standard (RCS). A yarn labeled eco cashmere without a named certification is making a claim without verification.
A stated percentage of recycled content. Quality recycled cashmere yarns state the exact blend ratio, and whether the recycled content comes from pre-consumer waste, post-consumer garments, or both.
A named origin. "Made in Italy" is a national claim. "Spun in Prato" names a specific district with a specific tradition. The more specific the origin, the deeper the supply chain usually is.
Evidence of color-first sorting. Yarns that describe their color palette as coming from the fiber itself, rather than from dyeing, signal a higher-craft sorting process.
Transparency about dyeing practices. Yarns that specify low-impact or certified dye processes (Greenpeace Detox protocol compliance, for example) signal care at the finishing stage. Yarns that say nothing about dye usually have nothing to say.

The absence of these details is also information. A yarn labeled eco cashmere without specifics is often relying on the word to do the work that a formal certification would do.

At Nordic Yarn

Our Eco Cashmere is spun in Prato by a family-owned mill that has been regenerating cashmere for generations. It is 50% virgin cashmere and 50% responsibly recycled cashmere, sorted by hand in Prato, blended at our mill, and spun on machines adjusted by people who have done this work their whole working lives. It is Cardato Recycled certified, which means every claim in this article applies to what we sell, verified by third-party audit.

Compared to 100% virgin cashmere, our Eco Cashmere requires 74% less water, 66% less energy, and produces 78% less CO2. The total environmental impact is approximately five times lower.

The palette comes from the fiber. Most of the colors we sell require little or no dye. The sorters separate by shade, and the blenders combine sorted recycled cashmere with undyed virgin cashmere until the color is right. Dark shades require a small addition of dye, applied using methods compliant with the Greenpeace Detox protocol, which restricts eleven classes of hazardous chemicals across the textile supply chain.

The mill we work with is the same mill that supplies cashmere to several couture design houses we do not name in marketing, out of respect for the relationships. The difference is that here, the same fiber reaches you directly, skein by skein.

Further reading: Textile Exchange's Global Recycled Standard, the Prato Chamber of Commerce on the Cardato certification, the the Good Cashmere Standard, and peer-reviewed research published in Resources and Energies.