Textile Exchange is making a policy change to its Organic Content Standard (OCS). Starting 1 December 2022, OCS will mandatorily require that site inputs from the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) should provide traceability of all transaction certificate data back to the original farm source (e.g. full transaction certificate data including product and input product) and farm input data (e.g. farm capacity).
The details: In order to decisively prevent fraud and to provide a double safety net, all first processors (e.g. cotton gins) that ultimately provide GOTS inputs into an OCS product down the supply chain shall be certified to the OCS and provide evidence of all inputs from farms.
- The additional data is being requested of certification bodies and standards users. This may require certification bodies to change contracts, policies, and technology systems to make this possible.
- The Textile Exchange announcement remarked: "While we can require our own certification bodies to supply this data, we cannot extend this requirement to certification bodies operating in other schemes."
Getting about business: To minimise business disruptions and resolve possible data sharing concerns, Textile Exchange is recommending that all sites not currently certified to OCS should begin the necessary steps to become OCS certified to ensure that data may be clearly shared through their certification bodies with Textile Exchange.
- To facilitate this (and the requirement for first processors to become OCS certified), through 30 June 2023, Textile Exchange would be waiving off OCS certification fees for any site that is currently GOTS certified and decides to add OCS certification (this is not applicable if site already has OCS & GOTS certificates).
- Textile Exchange is also permitting certification bodies to issue OCS scope certificates without conducting audits of sites holding valid GOTS certificates with the same validity through till 30 June 2023.
- Combined GOTS and OCS audits would then occur simultaneously with the GOTS renewal timing. In all these cases where an OCS scope certificate is issued through 30 June 2023, the validity date shall be the same as the GOTS scope certificate.
The reason: The Textile Exchange announcement said: "This policy change occurs in ASR-106 Accepted Equivalent Standards Policy and contributes to our continued efforts to strengthen integrity in organic cotton. The additional data sharing will enable Textile Exchange to have full traceability of the inputs to the OCS and allow us to perform more robust volume reconciliation in coordination with GOTS. This will also allow us to provide more robust traceability information with standards users as systems like TrackIt come online."
