GRS on the floor.

Of the standards on our wall, the Global Recycled Standard is the one buyers ask about most and the one most often misread. This post explains what a GRS certificate says, in plain terms, and just as importantly what it does not.

A chain-of-custody standard

GRS is not a promise that a product is green. It is a chain-of-custody standard: it verifies that material sold as recycled genuinely is, that its percentage is tracked from supplier to finished goods, and that the sites handling it meet social and environmental requirements along the way. The certificate follows the material, transaction by transaction.

GRS certifies a chain, not a slogan.

What the audit traces

On this floor the audit is mostly paperwork with a torch. Incoming recycled materials arrive with transaction certificates; the store logs them into segregated stock; production orders record which lots fed which styles; outgoing shipments carry certificates reconciling to what came in. The auditors walk the physical line the documents describe, from the racks to the marked production line, and the numbers have to meet in the middle.

What GRS does not claim

A GRS certificate does not measure a carbon footprint, does not rank one factory against another, and does not make a shoe with a recycled lining a recycled shoe. Where a claim needs a number, the standard requires the number to be specific: this material, this percentage, this order. We hold the certification for this facility, and certificate numbers are available to buyers on request.

If your programme carries recycled content claims, bring them to the first conversation. Scoping the chain of custody early is cheap; retrofitting it after the labels are printed is not.