What will happen to the OCS during the development of the Materials Matter Standard?

Our aim for the Materials Matter Standard (MMS) is to provide a unified approach to certification and chain of custody across all the materials within our strategic focus. Within cotton, it is important to acknowledge that there is a robust landscape of sustainability systems that already cover farm-level standards and certification as well as implementation support to producers. Following stakeholder review during the development process of the Material Matter Standard, we determined that the most effective way for our standards system to support our strategic goals regarding cotton involves two main approaches:

· Support the uptake and efficiency of existing cotton farm-level sustainability systems. We will do this through our work outside of the standards system but can also offer certified input recognition and access to our traceability tools to support those systems that may benefit from those tools. We will approach this with a focus on partnership and alignment behind shared Climate and Nature goals.

· Manage the Organic Content Standard (OCS) as a standalone standard in parallel to the MMS. Future development may also include a way to recognize organic producers and producer groups that are addressing areas out of the scope of traditional organic certification systems (e.g., human rights and livelihoods, regenerative practices, and impact data collection).

As was the case in the second draft of the unified standard criteria development, the MMS Pilot Version 1.0 does not include farm-level cotton production criteria to align with the stated approach above. The standard includes facility-level criteria for eligible cotton feedstocks entering the MMS system at the first processing stage for cotton (ginning) as part of our future plans to include cotton through recognition partnerships. The MMS facility-level criteria will not be required for sites seeking certification to the separate OCS.