RCS/GRS Revision IWG Call

June 15, 2016

Attendees:

Ashley Gill and Lee Tyler – Textile Exchange
Deepak Goel – Geetanjali Woolens

Kim Holmes – SPI / Plastics Industry Association

Nicole Munoz – SCS Certifications

John Graebin – Deckers Outdoor

Introductions

Chatham House Rules and Anti-Trust– Meetings are run under Chatham House Rules and we will always avoid Anti-Trust issues. This is a pre-competitive process. If the revision ever steps over those bounds, please point it out.

Review Documents– Terms of Reference and IWG Charter

  • IWG Charter –
  • Comment – we will run this by our legal department, but if there is a reason why we can’t sign it, would it preclude us? No, we want to know why first so we can address it, but we want everyone to agree with the Charter. So we can discuss on a case by case basis.
  • RCS ToR
  • Covered sections of the ToR? Purpose and why it is necessary. What is the standard to achieve?
  • CCS v2 revision
  • How the CCS affects all TE standards was explained
  • RCS is already affected by CCS v2, but sites need only be fully compliant by January 1, 2017.
  • Post Production exemption options. GRS will need to be discussed.
  • Comment – “non-food” was removed.
  • Comment – The RCS and GRS are two separate standards. Customers asking for both RCS and GRS. We will look at merging the standards. Even sending documents to show the difference between RCS and GRS is confusing and they never read it.

Question: In terms of adoption, how many recyclers are certified? 2015 RCS was 78 units and GRS was 595 sites, but that is of all sites from recyclers down through brands/wholesalers.

  • GRS ToR
  • Material Concentrators and Collectors do not fall into the scope of certification (chemical, social, environmental, chain of custody).
  • Input product chemical residues – We have been processing post-consumer, it is impossible to test against residues. Example of used clothing collected from anywhere in the world. We should still not test for chemical residues on inputs or final products. EU passed a law that all textiles made with post-consumer waste would be excluded from APO list. Link to be sent. Regulation 11

Steering Committee

  • Good regional representation.
  • Great to have the plastics industry (Non-textile industry) in this revision, when it was not in the last revision.
  • Three certification bodies may be a concern, but they each have unique expertise.
  • Comment: There was a call for chemical expertise on the last webinar, do you want them in the steering committee? Once we look at the work plan, the chemical portion is only one time period. So we were happy to have steering group representation by sector and region. Send comments by email if we need to reevaluate.

Initial Feedback

  • This was not requested in any other revision, but it worked well with lots of helpful feedback.
  • Full list of feedback will be made available.

Work Plan– Excel document will be made available. Discussed how the requirements will be divided up by Input verification, social and environmental, and chemical. These will occur once each month from July-September. An in person meeting will occur at our annual conference in Hamburg, Germany. Then open for 30 day consultation and hopefully a final release on January 1, 2017 if there is no 2nd consultation period needed.

Call Schedule

Action Items