Three certification logos, three different questions

Host: There are three logos on the bedding I am looking at. GOTS, OEKO-TEX, GREENGUARD. Which one is the real one?

Circadian: All three are real. They are answering three different questions, and the mistake is treating them as ranks on one scale where one of them wins.

Host: What three questions?

Circadian: GOTS asks where the fibre came from and who handled it. OEKO-TEX asks what chemicals are in the thing you are about to buy. GREENGUARD asks what comes off it into the air in your bedroom. A product can pass one and have nothing to say about the other two.

Host: Start with GOTS then. What does it cover?

Circadian: It starts at the farm and follows the fibre the whole way. How the cotton was grown, what was used on the field, what happened at the spinning mill, what dyes were allowed, and the labour conditions of the people doing all of it. It is a supply chain standard that happens to appear on a product label.

Host: So if something says organic cotton but does not say GOTS, what is it saying?

Circadian: Usually that the fibre was grown organically and nothing after that point was checked. That still counts for something. The gap is just that it stops before the part of the process where most of the chemistry happens. Growing is the clean part. Bleaching, dyeing and finishing is where things get added, and an organic-fibre claim with no chain of custody behind it covers none of that.

Host: That sounds like the one to care about, then.

Circadian: For fibre origin, yes. But it is worth knowing where GOTS stops. It audits the chain that made the thing. Nobody is sending the finished item to a lab under that standard, and those two approaches catch different failures.

Host: And that is what OEKO-TEX does.

Circadian: Standard 100, yes. That one ignores where the fibre came from entirely and tests the finished item against a list of over a thousand restricted substances. Threads, trims, the lot. It has a class system, and the strictest tier is the one written for things a baby under three puts in its mouth.

Host: So something conventionally farmed could still pass OEKO-TEX.

Circadian: It could. Chemically clean and conventionally grown sit together perfectly well, and so do organically grown and chemically finished. That is why the two standards exist side by side instead of one replacing the other.

Host: Where does ours sit on that?

Circadian: Worth being precise, because this is where brands get slippery. On our side OEKO-TEX applies to the latex fill. It is not a claim across the whole range, and I would rather say that plainly than let a logo do work it has not earned. The organic textile certification is the one that covers our cotton and wool pillows, fill and shell both.

Host: What about PFAS? That is the one people ask me about.

Circadian: OEKO-TEX banned intentional PFAS use across its standards at the start of 2024, and it holds a total fluorine limit that tightened this year. What it does not do is issue a PFAS-free claim, and you should be suspicious of anyone who reads it as one. A limit is a limit. It means below a threshold, not absent.

Host: That feels like a hedge.

Circadian: It is a limit rather than a hedge, and the difference matters. Nobody can certify zero of anything, because detection has a floor and the floor keeps moving. What you can certify is that intentional use is banned and that measured fluorine sits under a stated number. Anyone selling you the word free is telling you something the testing cannot support.

Host: Then GREENGUARD. Where does that fit?

Circadian: Different question again. They put the finished, assembled product in a sealed chamber and measure what it releases into the air over time. Volatile organic compounds. The Gold tier is the stricter one, several hundred compounds, and a formaldehyde threshold several times lower than the standard tier.

Host: Is that relevant for a pillow? It sounds like a mattress or a paint problem.

Circadian: That is a fair instinct. It matters most for things with foam, adhesives and a lot of assembled mass, which is why you see it on mattresses and furniture. A plant fibre in a cotton shell has very little to off-gas in the first place. It is a strong certification answering a question that a simple natural-fibre pillow was never going to fail.

Host: So which one do I look for?

Circadian: Work backwards from your worry. Farming, pesticides and who picked the cotton points you at GOTS. What is in the fabric against your face points at OEKO-TEX. A smell in the room, or a chemically sensitive household, points at GREENGUARD, and mostly on the bigger items rather than a pillow.

Host: And if the worry is all three?

Circadian: Then you want at least two logos, and you want to check what each one covers rather than counting them. That is where people get caught. Plenty of bedding carries an organic certification on the cover fabric only, with whatever is inside uncertified. On ours the certification covers the fill as well as the shell, which is a wider scope than the category norm, and it is a specific enough claim that you can ask any brand for it.

Host: How would I check that? I am not going to audit anybody.

Circadian: You do not have to. Every certification is a numbered licence and that number is public, so any brand claiming one can hand it over and you can look up its scope. A brand that cannot produce a number is showing you decoration.

Host: What do I see when I look one up?

Circadian: The record carries the name of whoever holds the licence, which is the mill or the workshop that made the goods, not the brand on the label. Ours is held by the workshop that sews our bedding. That looks wrong for about ten seconds and then makes sense: certification follows the people handling the fibre. Almost no bedding brand owns its own mill, so almost none of them appear under their own name.

Host: Does anyone check any of this, or is it a fee and a logo?

Circadian: For GOTS there is a physical inspection every year. Somebody turns up. It is not a form you file. That is the strongest thing about it and it is the part almost nobody mentions, because an annual visit is far harder to fake than a certificate.

Host: Last one. If a label has no certification at all, is it bad?

Circadian: Not necessarily. Certification costs real money every year, and there are small makers doing careful work who cannot carry it. What you lose without it is the ability to check. You are trusting the person instead of the audit, and that is a reasonable thing to do knowingly and a bad thing to do by accident.

Host: Where is the written version?

Circadian: At circadianrest.com, with what each standard covers side by side. Our voices in this episode are synthetic. The words are ours.