What is a certified material? How does the certification system work? 

TrusTrace CMC (Certified Material Compliance) is a solution that focuses only on certified materials. It enables brands to make compliant claims about their usage of certified materials. 

A certified material is any kind of material that has been produced in accordance with a sustainability standard governed by a third-party organization called a standard body. There are standards that exist for specific materials such as down or wool, and there are standards that are more generic like for instance organic or recycled standards. For each of these standards, the certification criteria are set by the standard bodies such as GOTS or Textile Exchange for instance. 

The certification documents are issued by certification bodies, independent from the standard bodies, such as Control Union, EcoCert, SGS and others.

In general, for those types of standards, compliance will be proven by two complementary types of documents issued at different stages of the supply chain. 

• Scope Certificate (SC): A SC is issued when a supplier facility complies with a given standard and satisfies all the criteria to manufacture products that are certified to that standard. A SC has a certain validity period and will have to be renewed after a certain period of time based on an audit of the factory. 
• Transaction Certificate (TC): A TC is issued when a given shipment of goods was manufactured in compliance with a certain standard. It represents a transaction between different suppliers and applies to a specific shipment, shipped at a specific date. A factory can only ship materials covered by a TC if it is itself covered by a SC. 

For a finished product to be certified, all the steps of the supply chain must be certified. A finished product cannot be certified if the fabric used to manufacture it is not certified itself, and so on until the raw material. This series of documents constitutes a Chain of Custody, that we will refer to as “Document-based Chain of Custody” in this whole document.

Thus, if a brand wants to make a certified material claim on the product itself, such as “this product is made with organic cotton”, the Chain of Custody must be completed until the end product. The certification information contained in this Chain of Custody is what backs up this type of claim. 

Please note that certain certification schemes require every step of the supply chain to be certified by the certifying body in order to use their logo on the final product. If a certification is missing on for example the final product, the CMC solution enables equivalent claims to be made to the final product. The certification logo however, will not be allowed on the final product.