OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100: what it tests and what it does not

The direct answer first, because the misconceptions are the reason many people arrive here. OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 certifies that a textile article and its components have been tested for harmful substances. It is a product certification, not a facility certification, and it says nothing about fibre origin, organic status, recycled content or social conditions.

Everything else on this page follows from that sentence. Where the scheme is described accurately it is genuinely useful evidence; where it is used as a general credential it is being asked to prove things it never claimed to.

What is actually tested

The certification applies to the article and its components. In OEKO-TEX's own description, every item bearing the label is certified as having passed safety tests for the presence of harmful substances, with every thread, button and accessory tested against a list of over a thousand harmful substances. The process includes on-site company visits as part of verification rather than testing alone.

The component point is the practically important one for apparel. A certified fabric is not a certified garment, because a garment contains sewing thread, labels, zips, buttons, elastic and applied decoration, and the certification covers the article with its components. That makes it another version of the chain question the certified materials hub sets out, arriving from a different direction: here the issue is the bill of materials rather than the processing chain.

The four product classes

Requirements are graded by how much contact the product has with skin, which is why the class a product falls into is a specification question rather than an administrative one.

For a buyer the consequence is that a certificate has a class, and the class has to match the product. A component certified in a class intended for furnishing materials is not automatically appropriate for a garment worn against the skin, and a childrenswear programme has the strictest requirements of all. Checking the class is part of checking the certificate, not a refinement of it.

What it is not

Four misreadings account for much of the confusion, and each is worth naming.

• It is not an organic certification. Testing for harmful substances establishes nothing about whether cotton was grown organically. That is what GOTS addresses.
• It is not a recycled-content certification. It says nothing about whether polyester was recycled, which is covered by the schemes in recycled-content certification.
• It is not a social-compliance certification. It does not assess labour conditions, and a Sedex membership or an audit is a different thing again, as set out in factory audits.
• It is not a factory certification. The object of certification is the product, not the site. A supplier describing itself as an OEKO-TEX certified factory is describing something the scheme does not issue.

STeP and MADE IN GREEN

OEKO-TEX operates several schemes and they are frequently collapsed into one another. Two are worth distinguishing because they are what people usually mean when they reach for a factory-level claim.

They are not tiers of the same certificate, and one does not include the others by default. A product label under one scheme is not evidence for another, so a claim should name the scheme it actually rests on.

Verifying a certificate

OEKO-TEX provides a direct verification route, which is more useful than a supplier-supplied document. Certificates and labels can be checked using OEKO-TEX Label Check, by scanning the QR code on a label or entering the certificate number online.

The official check is published at oeko-tex.com, and it takes less time than reading the certificate it verifies.

Where it fits alongside testing you already do

Harmful-substance certification sits next to, rather than inside, the testing a garment programme normally runs. Colourfastness, dimensional stability and wash performance are quality and care questions with their own methods, covered in colourfastness and wash testing before bulk. A certificate for harmful substances does not answer them, and a good wash test result does not substitute for it.

Chemical regulation is a third thing again. Compliance frameworks apply to products placed on a market regardless of whether a voluntary certification is held, and holding a certificate is not the same as being compliant, nor is compliance evidence of certification. How the legal requirements, a buyer restricted substances list and an industry programme relate to certification is covered in chemical compliance.