AWTA to close wool testing laboratory
03/03/2009
AWTA managing director, Michael Jackson, said: “While AWTA Ltd has made many major changes to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs over the past 10 years, the significant and ongoing decline in the volume of Australian raw wool production means that it is no longer viable to operate three wool testing laboratories in Australia.
“AWTA Ltd will close the Sir William Gunn Laboratory, which is located at Yennora, NSW, at the end of the current wool selling season. The work currently performed by the Sydney Laboratory will then be re-distributed between the two remaining AWTA Ltd Australian laboratories located in Melbourne and Perth”.
He added: “The short- to medium-term outlook offers little prospect of a recovery in the volume of Australian wool production and so, for the foreseeable future, the two remaining laboratories will be able to cater for all Australian wool testing requirements.”
AWTA Ltd anticipates that by the end of the current 2008/09 season it will have conducted approximately half the number of tests that it did when Australian wool production peaked during the late 1980s and early 1990s. During that period, testing volumes peaked at over 750,000 presale yield and micron tests nationally each year.
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