July 13, 2026
The numbers of renewal
Renewal sounds like a feeling. Underneath, it is arithmetic: grams gathered against grams needed, set against how long the result lasts. None of these numbers are exact; coats vary by breed, season, and care, and the figures below are the ranges commonly reported by groomers and hand-spinners rather than laboratory measurements. Read as ranges, they still tell a clear story: a companion sheds far more usable fibre in a year than a single scarf requires.
What a coat gives in a year
Most of a companion's shed hair is discarded: swept up, brushed out, thrown away. Only the soft undercoat is spinnable, and the amount a healthy animal releases over a year, recoverable through regular brushing, falls into rough bands.
| Coat type | Recoverable undercoat per year | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Large double-coated dog | ~100–400 g | Commonly reported by groomers; peaks in shedding season |
| Medium-coated dog | ~40–120 g | Varies with breed and grooming routine |
| Cat | ~20–80 g | Gathered slowly, often over more than a year |
The upper figures are not unusual for a heavy-shedding breed during a seasonal blow. The point is scale. What is normally lost is measured in hundreds of grams.
What one scarf asks for
A Lunma scarf is spun from roughly eighty grams of a companion's shed strands blended with about one hundred grams of ethically sourced wool, around one hundred and eighty grams of finished yarn in total.
| Quantity | Amount |
|---|---|
| Companion strands per scarf | ~80 g |
| Wool per scarf | ~100 g |
| Finished yarn, total | ~180 g |
| Strands otherwise discarded, now kept | ~80 g |
Read against the first table, the arithmetic is plain. Eighty grams is a fraction of what a large double-coated dog sheds in a single year. The strands for one scarf are, for many companions, gathered from ordinary brushing over a season or two.
The scarves in a year
Turning the ratio around: a large double-coated dog can shed the raw strands for the equivalent of one to several scarves across a year, a cat closer to the strands for a single scarf gathered over a longer stretch. In practice most people make one, a deliberate object rather than a production run. The surplus reassures: the fibre was not scarce, only unnoticed.
A note on lifespan
The last figure is the one that resists a number. A well-made wool-blend scarf, washed rarely and kept with care, is a multi-decade object. Set against the pace of disposable fashion, garments worn a handful of times and discarded within a year or two, a single scarf outlasts many cycles of the alternative. We make no claim about carbon here, only about time: an object kept for decades displaces a great many that were not.
That is the whole arithmetic. Eighty grams that would have been swept away, one hundred grams of honest wool, and one object meant to outlive the habit of replacing things.
What the carbon number means
The homepage states that the eighty grams of wool each piece does without would have cost about a kilogram of CO₂e to produce. Here is exactly how that figure is built, and what it deliberately leaves out.
Peer-reviewed life-cycle studies of virgin sheep wool disagree widely — from roughly 7 to over 35 kg CO₂e per kilogram of greasy wool at the farm gate — because sheep produce both wool and meat, and studies split the flock's emissions between the two in different ways. Rather than pick a flattering number, we take the conservative low end of a recent peer-reviewed study (Li et al., 2024, AATCC Journal of Research: 14.2 kg CO₂e/kg under mass allocation). Eighty grams of wool at that rate is about 1.1 kg CO₂e.
To make that quantity tangible we use the U.S. EPA's public greenhouse-gas equivalencies calculator: 1.1 kg CO₂e corresponds to roughly 140 smartphone charges, or about 4.7 km driven in an average passenger car.
What we do not claim: that a Lunma piece is "X% lower carbon" than any other garment. That comparison would require a product-level life-cycle assessment we have not commissioned. The figures above describe the wool our blend does without — nothing more. In Canada, less than one per cent of discarded textiles are made into something new (University of Waterloo, 2023); we would rather begin with fibre that was never discarded at all.