Eight ways a fiber has had a prior life
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The rule is one sentence and it is a prohibition
The terms virgin or new, as descriptive of a wool product or any fiber or part thereof, shall not be used when the product, fiber or part so described is not composed wholly of new or virgin fiber.
And then it defines what new or virgin fiber is, by exclusion
Fiber which has never been reclaimed from any spun, woven, knitted, felted, braided, bonded, or otherwise manufactured or used product.
Six named processes, then a catch all, then a condition of use
Spun, woven, knitted, felted, braided and bonded are processes. Otherwise manufactured sweeps up the rest. Used is not a process at all, it is a history.
So a fiber can fail this test without ever having been processed
Reclaimed from a used product is enough. The fiber does not have to have been spun or woven for the word virgin to be unavailable.
Wholly is the word that makes the rule strict
Composed wholly of new or virgin fiber. Not principally, not substantially. There is no threshold here, which is notable in a title full of thresholds.
And that absence of a threshold is itself a finding
The adjacent part suppresses a name below five percent by weight, and the trim provisions turn on fifteen and twenty percent of surface area. This section declines to pick a number and uses wholly instead.
It also applies to a part, not only to a product
As descriptive of a wool product, or any fiber or part thereof. So a claim about one component of a garment is inside the rule even where the garment as a whole makes no claim.
Which is the same structure the fiber content rules use
A statement about a part has to be true of that part. The specificity of the claim does not reduce the standard it is held to.
Across this library that is a recurring shape
A term that reads as an absolute and is treated as one, next to terms that read as absolutes and turn out to be thresholds. Lead free is a threshold. Virgin is not.