What Is the Global Recycled Standard (GRS) Certificate?

The Global Recycled Standard (GRS) is a voluntary group of standards to verify and monitor the content of recycled materials in a product. It addresses social requirements, environmental principles, labeling and chemical ingredients, with traceability that applies to all supply chains. Covering the production, packaging, labeling, processing, trade and distribution of products made from at least 20% recycled materials, GRS sets out the requirements for party certification of recycled products, environmental and social practices, chemical restriction and chain of custody.

The standard supports organizations that verify the chemical, environmental and social practices responsible for the production of recycled content and products. The standard is generally associated with textiles, but it is not limited to that field; it covers recycled materials of every kind. The organisation behind it is Textile Exchange.

How does the GRS differ from the RCS?

Both are Textile Exchange standards and many producers hold them together, but they cover different ground. Textile Exchange’s own Quick Guide to the RCS and GRS (GRS-403 v4.0) draws the line: the RCS sets requirements for recycled input and chain of custody; the GRS covers those and adds social and environmental practices and chemical restrictions.

For a buyer this decides which document to ask for. If you need to evidence how much recycled material a product contains, the RCS answers it. If the conditions under which that material was processed are also in scope, the GRS is the one to request.

What is the scope of the GRS certificate?

The GRS audits more than the share of recycled content; it also covers the conditions under which that content was processed. Six areas fall inside the scope:

Chain of Custody: Tracks materials from producer to consumer
Threshold: the standard applies to products containing 20% or more recycled content (Global Recycled Standard v4.0, clause A3.1a). The 20% is an entry threshold, not the share it certifies
Environmental impacts: Examines the environmental impacts that occur during the production of products
Ethics: avoiding unethical and questionable sources
Workers’ Rights: Ensure that all workers are treated fairly and equally and that they meet ILO-accepted labor standards.
Supply chain: weighing the risks that arise along the chain so that sourcing improvements do not create environmental harm

Benefits of GRS certification

What the certificate buys on the purchasing side is an independently verified claim rather than a stated one:

Allows tracking of recycled materials
Helps customers make informed decisions
Keeps the environmental and human impact of production to a minimum
Ensures materials are recycled and handled safely
Addresses quality issues of recycled products

Does a Scope Certificate prove a shipment is GRS certified?

It does not — and this is the distinction buyers most often miss when they first request the document. A Scope Certificate shows that a facility is certified to produce within the GRS scope. It says nothing about any particular shipment.

The certificate states this itself:

“This Scope Certificate provides no proof that any goods delivered by its holder are GRS, RCS certified. Proof of GRS, RCS certification of goods delivered is provided by a valid Transaction Certificate (TC) or equivalent covering them.”

So no producer can honestly claim that every shipment is GRS certified. The two questions to ask are separate: does the facility hold a valid Scope Certificate, and can a Transaction Certificate be issued for this order? The second belongs in the order conversation.

Check the validity date

Scope Certificates are often assumed to be open-ended. They are not. How certification works is set out in Textile Exchange’s GRS Implementation Manual (v4.2) and Standards Claims Policy (TE-301 v1.3). Every certificate carries a validity date, and before it runs out the certification body re-audits the facility and issues a renewed document. Time can pass between the audit and the new certificate being issued.

As a buyer the check is simple: look at the validity date printed on the document you were given. If it has passed, the document is not evidence and a current one should be requested. The question to the supplier is equally short — through which date is the certificate valid, and has the renewal audit taken place?

None of this implies a producer has lost its certification; it is simply how these documents work. But a buyer who does not check the date risks passing an expired document on to their own customer as evidence.

Recycled content is not the same as recyclable

These two get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Recycled content means recycled feedstock went into making the product — this is what the GRS and RCS certify. Recyclable means the product can enter a recycling stream after use, which is a separate assessment entirely.

A product can carry recycled content without being recyclable, and the other way round. GRS certification speaks only to the first.

Where DEKA Plastik stands

Everything above describes the standard itself; here is where we stand. We hold a single Scope Certificate covering both GRS 4.0 and RCS 2.0, issued under the Textile Exchange standards by an ANAB-accredited certification body and renewed after the re-audit in September 2026. The product annex lists “Packing sacks, bags” — our bag and sack production falls inside the certified scope.

Two recipes are used for recycled-content production, and which one applies is decided per customer: 100% recycled post-consumer polyethylene, or 95% recycled polypropylene. Both figures are listed in the certificate’s product annex, which makes them the most concrete document-backed claim we can offer.

The term post-consumer in the first recipe is a defined one: the material comes from products that reached a consumer and then entered the waste stream. Its counterpart is post-industrial material, recovered from scrap generated during manufacturing. Both count as recycled, but they are not the same thing, and buyer specifications often distinguish between them.

Two limits belong here as plainly as the claim does. First, as set out above, our Scope Certificate on its own does not prove that a given shipment is GRS certified — if you need shipment-level evidence, that has to be arranged at the order stage. Second, recycled-content production is for non-food use; food-contact products are made from virgin polymer only, and the two do not combine. Where we stand on packaging regulation is set out on our PPWR compliance page.

We do not publish our certificate numbers on the site; they are shared on request during quotation.

You can review our GRS Bag produced within this scope, and find all of our documentation in the Quality Certificates section.