Organic Cotton
Texas, USA
USDA certified organic, grown in Texas, milled in upstate New York, then filled and sewn by hand in New Jersey.
Sustainability, in specifics
Everything inside grew.
The fill and the cover, on every pillow we make. Cotton and wool off certified organic farms, kapok gathered from the forest floor, buckwheat hulls the food system has to throw out, and latex tapped from a tree that keeps standing. Here is where every one of them came from, what it does for you, and how many years it has in it.
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Where each fill came from
Every one of them came off a farm or a forest floor.
Six fills, and not one of them starts in a barrel of oil. Here is the origin of each, and what happens to the plant or the animal it came from.
Organic Wool
New Zealand
Shorn from sheep on certified organic farms with rotating pastures. The animal keeps its life and grows the fleece back.
Wild-Harvested Kapok
Indonesia
Gathered from seed pods that ripened, split and dropped on their own. The tree stays where it is and fruits again the next season.
USA-Grown Buckwheat
Regional US farms
The shell a flour mill has to take off the grain before anyone can eat it. We buy what was already coming off.
Tree-Tapped Latex
Sri Lanka
Sap from a shallow cut in the bark that heals over. The same tree is tapped again the next day for twenty-five years.
Buckwool Hybrid
New Zealand and the USA
Both of the above, in one cover with a divider down the middle so each side adjusts on its own.
Every one of those covers is organic cotton, and every pillow is filled, sewn and checked by hand in New Jersey, in a workshop that has been making pillows since 1981.
The part you can measure
A pillow you can refill is a pillow you do not replace.
The most sustainable pillow is the one you never throw away, so start with the number that decides most of the impact, which is how many pillows you end up buying.
The fill wears out. The pillow does not.
A synthetic pillow is usually finished inside six to twelve months. The fiber crushes flat, and there is no way to bring it back once it has. Then it goes in the bin and you buy another one. Do that for ten years and you have owned somewhere between ten and twenty pillows.
Every Circadian pillow opens along the side seam. When the height drops you put fill back in, and when it sits too tall you take some out and keep what you took. We sell every fill on its own for exactly this reason.
So you are replacing a bag of cotton rather than a whole pillow, once every few years rather than every spring, and the cover, the zipper and the stitching you paid for the first time are all still doing their job.
Buckwheat
Every buckwheat pillow we make is filled with something the food system throws out.
The hull is the shell around the buckwheat groat. It is close to a third of the grain by weight depending on the variety, and nobody can eat it, so every mill that turns buckwheat into flour has to take it off and find somewhere for it to go. That is what you are sleeping on, and upcycled is the honest word for it.
The crop is worth knowing about on its own, because buckwheat is a regenerative cover crop and the agronomy is published. Farmers plant it to rebuild ground between cash crops, since it pulls phosphorus out of soil that other plants cannot reach, close to three times as well as barley and more than ten times as well as rye, in the USDA-SARE handbook Managing Cover Crops Profitably. It uses half the soil moisture of soybeans. It goes from seed to flower in 70 to 90 days, then keeps flowering for up to ten weeks, which is ten weeks of food for hover flies, predatory wasps and lady beetles.
None of that happened for your pillow. The farm grows buckwheat for grain and for soil, the mill takes the hulls off because it has no choice, and we buy the part that was already coming off. What you get out of the end of somebody else's process is the firmest and coolest fill we make.
Upcycled from
About a third of the grain
Seed to flower
70 to 90 days
In flower
Up to 10 weeks
Kapok
The kapok tree is never cut down to fill a pillow.
Ceiba pentandra grows wild through the tropics. A mature one throws 300 to 400 seed pods in a season, then does it again the next year, for decades. The pods ripen, split and fall. The fiber is gathered off the ground by hand and the tree is left standing exactly as it was.
Leaving it standing is worth more than the fiber. Ceiba is pollinated by bats, and one tree can put out over 200 liters of nectar in a season, which is why the bats keep coming back to it. The hollow trunks of the old ones shelter harpy eagles, owls and small mammals. A tree that fruits for decades is worth more alive to the people living around it than it is as timber, and that is the arithmetic we are paying into.
What reaches your bed is the lightest fill we make. Each fiber is a hollow tube that runs 80 to 90 percent air, the highest hollow ratio of any natural fiber, so the pillow sits soft and low under your head and moves air through itself instead of holding your heat.
Pods per season
300 to 400
Air by volume
80 to 90%
Trees felled
None
Six fills
The right one depends on how you sleep, not on how you shop.
The quiz asks about your position, your shoulders and how warm you run, then points at one fill and explains why.
Find your fill
Latex
The rubber tree is tapped for thirty years and then becomes furniture.
Latex is sap. A shallow cut is opened in the bark of a Hevea brasiliensis, the tree runs, the cut heals, and it gets tapped again. Tapping starts around year 6 or 7. The tree then stays productive for 25 to 30 years, and the whole plantation cycle runs 30 to 40. The rubber-tree sourcing is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified, which covers the plantation it comes from and the chain of custody after it.
When the yield finally drops the tree comes out, a new one goes in, and the timber goes into furniture, flooring and plywood as rubberwood. The trade values it for the reason you would want it valued, that it is the by-product of a farm rather than a hardwood felled to be made into a chair. You are sleeping on the sap and somebody else is sitting on the tree.
The latex is certified to OEKO-TEX Standard 100 Class 1, which is the strictest tier the standard has. Class 1 is written for articles a child under three can put in its mouth, because infant skin absorbs the most, and it tests for over a thousand harmful substances. Bedding only ever has to reach Class 2. Pairing that with certified rubber-tree sourcing is rare in this category, because most latex pillows carry one or the other.
One more fact about the material and we will leave it there. Soil bacteria exist that can live on natural rubber as their only source of carbon, and one of them was isolated from the soil of a Sri Lankan rubber plantation. Nothing does the same to polyurethane, which is what memory foam is.
First tapped
Year 6 or 7
Productive for
25 to 30 years
Tested to
Class 1, infant grade
Wool
Wool goes back into the ground and feeds it.
Wool is keratin, the same protein as your hair, held together by sulphur bonds. Soil microbes make the enzymes that break those bonds, so wool laid into ordinary soil comes apart instead of sitting there. The fibrous layer is gone in about three months in good conditions, and it varies with the soil, the climate and how fine the fiber is. What comes out of it is nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus and potassium, which is to say fertilizer. The fill is biodegradable in soil and compostable at the end of its life, which is a sentence almost no pillow on the market can finish.
Our wool comes from certified organic farms in New Zealand that move their flocks between pastures rather than grazing one field down, which is the oldest regenerative practice there is and the reason the ground recovers between seasons. The standard we certify under also bans the practice of cutting skin from a lamb's hindquarters to keep flies off it, which is still routine in much of the wool trade and which plain organic certification does not rule out on its own.
The wool is scoured to the standard's rules with its lanolin left in, and it is left undyed. The reason any of this reaches you is that the same protein structure moves moisture off your skin. Wool holds up to 30 percent of its own weight in water while its surface stays dry, so you wake up dry rather than clammy.
What the certificate covers
Our organic certificate is three promises, and the fiber is only the first.
Most brands treat the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) as a statement about a plant. It is wider than that. The two parts nobody quotes are the two that do the environmental work.
Promise one
The fiber
To be graded organic under the standard, at least 95 percent of a product has to be certified organic fiber. The audit follows that fiber through every facility that touches it, from harvest through spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting and sewing.
Promise two
The water
Every wet-processing facility in the chain has to run a working effluent treatment plant and document its wastewater analysis. Dyeing and finishing is where textile manufacturing does most of its damage to rivers, and this is the clause written to address it.
Promise three
The people
The social criteria are built on the International Labour Organization core conventions, and they apply to every processor, manufacturer and trader in the chain rather than to the farm alone.
Licence
GOTS-10229
Issued by Oregon TilthGlobal Organic Textile Standard 7.0
We hold this under licence GOTS-10229, issued by Oregon Tilth. It covers the finished cotton pillow, the finished wool pillow and both duvets, fill and cover together.
It is not the only certificate in the range. Here is every one we hold and the exact thing each covers, with more detail on the certifications page.
If you want to read any of them, write to us at jacob@circadianrest.com and we will send it to you.
GOTS Certified Organic
Licence GOTS-10229, Oregon Tilth. Covers the Organic Cotton pillow, the Organic Wool pillow and both duvets, fill and cover together.
USDA certified organic
The cotton fibre itself, grown on certified organic farms in Texas.
OEKO-TEX Standard 100, Class 1
The Tree-Tapped Latex. Class 1 is the strictest tier the standard runs, written for what a child under three can put in its mouth, and it screens for over a thousand harmful substances. Bedding only ever has to reach Class 2.
FSC certified
The rubber-tree sourcing behind the latex, covering the plantation and the chain of custody after it, from the Forest Stewardship Council.
GREENGUARD Gold
The waterproof pillow protector. It is the low-emission tier written for products used in schools and childcare, so the one item in the range with a barrier in it is the one held to an air-quality standard.
Across the whole range, nothing gets a chemical treatment at any stage. Flame retardants, formaldehyde finishes, stain repellents and anti-wrinkle resins are all absent for the same plain reason, which is that the workshop does not run any of those processes. The wool keeps its lanolin and is left undyed, and the covers come in one shade, which is the shade the cotton already was.
The two that were never farmed
Organic is a farming certificate. Two of our fills never saw a farm.
Organic certification audits a field: what went into the soil, what was sprayed on the crop, how the ground was managed between seasons. That is the right question to ask about cotton and wool. It is not the question that settles what is inside a fiber gathered off the forest floor, or a shell the food system had already set aside.
Kapok is not a crop.
Ceiba pentandra grows wild through the tropics and drops its pods on its own. The fiber is gathered off the forest floor by hand rather than grown to a schedule and cut. An organic farm audit would arrive to find nothing in front of it to inspect.
What an organic certificate is working toward is fiber with nothing applied to it. Wild kapok starts there.
The hull is not a crop either.
It is the shell a flour mill has to take off the grain before anyone can eat it. It reaches us grown in the United States, untreated by synthetic pesticide and unprocessed by chemistry. The cleaning is done by air jet and the sterilizing by ultraviolet light, so there is nothing left behind that a certificate would exist to rule out.
One ingredient, in the state the food system left it in.
Both are certified where the certificate belongs.
Both are built inside a certified organic cotton cover. Both are weighed, filled, sewn and checked by hand in the New Jersey workshop.
A single untreated ingredient in an organic cotton cover is the shortest honest answer there is to what is in your pillow.
A certificate is how you prove a farm behaved itself. Where there was never a farm, and the fill is one thing with nothing done to it, the pillow makes that case on its own.
The last thing we do
Nothing reaches your pillow between the workshop and your bed.
Cotton and kapok take on whatever is in the air around them, and that is the same property that makes them good to sleep on. The clear bag inside the box is there to keep that air off them, and the grade of it was chosen with as much care as the fill.
01
What it does
A cardboard box crossing the country in a truck keeps out neither damp nor dust. The bag keeps out both, so what you open is what left the workshop.
02
What it is
Virgin polyethylene, confirmed to us in writing by the workshop.
03
The plastic we refuse
PVC has to have plasticizers added to keep it soft, and the plasticizers are the component that migrates out of the film and into whatever it is wrapped around. Polyethylene needs none, so there is nothing in it to come off on something you put your face on.
04
How we know
It is documented for the audit their workshop takes in person every year.
Asked and answered
The questions people send us about all of this.
Every answer here is the same one we would give you over email, and every number in them appears somewhere above with its source.
What makes Circadian pillows sustainable?
Three things you can check rather than take on trust. Every fill is grown or gathered rather than manufactured out of petroleum. Every pillow opens along the side seam so the fill is what gets replaced instead of the pillow, which is what keeps it in use for years instead of months. And the fill goes back into soil at the end of its life. The Organic Cotton and Organic Wool pillows are certified organic as finished pillows, fill and cover together, under Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) licence GOTS-10229.
Are Circadian pillows biodegradable?
The fills are, in soil. Wool is keratin held together by sulphur bonds, and soil microbes make the enzymes that break those bonds, so the fibrous layer is gone in about three months in good conditions and releases nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus and potassium as it goes. Cotton, kapok and buckwheat hulls are plant matter and break down the same way. We always say biodegradable in soil rather than leaving the word open, because a sealed landfill is an airless place where very little breaks down quickly.
Can you compost a Circadian pillow?
You can compost the fill. Organic cotton, wool, kapok and buckwheat hulls are natural fibre and go into a home pile the way any other plant or animal matter does. The zipper and the sewing are not compostable, so the move at the end is to open the pillow, take the fill out for the compost heap or straight onto the garden, and send the cover to textile recycling.
What certifications does Circadian hold?
Five, each covering a specific thing. Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) licence GOTS-10229, issued by Oregon Tilth, covers the finished Organic Cotton pillow, the finished Organic Wool pillow and both duvets, fill and cover together. USDA certified organic covers the cotton fibre itself. OEKO-TEX Standard 100 Class 1 covers the tree-tapped latex, and Class 1 is the strictest tier the standard runs, written for what a child under three can put in its mouth. FSC certification covers the rubber-tree sourcing behind that latex. GREENGUARD Gold covers the waterproof pillow protector.
Where does Circadian source its materials?
Organic cotton from certified organic farms in Texas, milled in upstate New York. Organic wool from certified organic farms in New Zealand. Kapok gathered from wild Ceiba pentandra trees in Indonesia, which are never felled to collect the pods. Buckwheat hulls from regional farms in the United States. Latex tapped from rubber trees in Sri Lanka. Every pillow is then filled, sewn and checked by hand in a New Jersey workshop that has been making pillows since 1981.
Are Circadian pillows vegan?
Four of the six are. Organic Cotton, Wild-Harvested Kapok, USA-Grown Buckwheat and Tree-Tapped Latex are all plant-based. The Organic Wool pillow and the Buckwool Hybrid both contain wool, so neither is vegan. If you want the closest thing to a down pillow without the feathers, kapok is the one to look at.
Is the buckwheat fill really upcycled?
Yes, and it is the plainest case of upcycling in bedding. The hull is the shell around the buckwheat groat, close to a third of the grain by weight depending on the variety, and it is inedible, so every mill that turns buckwheat into flour has to take it off and find somewhere for it to go. We buy the part that was already coming off. The crop itself is a regenerative cover crop, planted to rebuild ground between cash crops, and the USDA-SARE handbook Managing Cover Crops Profitably records it pulling phosphorus out of soil close to three times as well as barley.
How long does a Circadian pillow last?
Organic Cotton lasts two to four years, and longer again if you refill it. Wild-Harvested Kapok lasts two to four years with regular fluffing. USA-Grown Buckwheat, Organic Wool and the Buckwool Hybrid all run three to five years. Tree-Tapped Latex goes up to a decade, and both duvets last ten to fifteen years. A typical synthetic pillow is finished inside six to twelve months. Because every Circadian pillow opens along the side seam and every fill is sold on its own, the fill is what gets replaced rather than the whole pillow.
What is the pillow packaged in?
A cardboard box, with a clear protective bag around the pillow inside it. The bag is virgin polyethylene, confirmed to us in writing by the workshop and documented for the audit their workshop takes in person every year. PVC is the plastic we will not use, because PVC has to have plasticizers added to keep it soft and the plasticizers are the component that migrates out of the film. Polyethylene needs none. Cotton and kapok take on whatever is in the air around them, so the bag is what makes sure the pillow arrives the way it left the workshop.
Is Circadian wool ethically sourced?
The wool comes from certified organic farms in New Zealand that move their flocks between pastures rather than grazing a single field down. The standard we certify under bans the practice of cutting skin from a lamb's hindquarters to keep flies off it, which is still routine across much of the wool trade. Its social criteria are built on the International Labour Organization core conventions and apply to every processor, manufacturer and trader in the chain rather than to the farm alone.
A note from Jacob
I would rather give you the receipts than the adjectives.
A sustainability page is one of the easiest pages on a website to write, because almost nobody checks it. Write down the good words, set a leaf beside them, and the page has done its job.
I wanted one you could check instead. Every number above is a third party's audit, something the workshop has put in writing to us, or published work I can point you to, and I will send you any of it if you ask.
That is why this page shows you the tree, the mill and the hull. Write to me if you want to go further into any of it.
Jacob KatzFounder, Circadian
Where to start
Find the fill that fits how you sleep.
An eco-friendly pillow is one that was grown rather than manufactured, refilled rather than replaced, and whose fill goes back into the soil at the end. That is all six of ours. The quiz takes about two minutes and asks how you sleep rather than what you want to spend.
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