Gore promotes GRS status and promises more recycled laminates
The Gore Fabrics Division has gained Global Recycled Standard (GRS) certification in both of its manufacturing sites, in Shenzhen, China and Putzbrunn, Germany.
GRS is an international standard that sets requirements for third-party certification of recycled content, social and environmental practices, chemical restrictions and chain of custody.
It describes the certification as a milestone in its efforts to reduce the environmental footprint of providing high performance products.
Originally the GRS was developed by Control Union Certifications in 2008 and ownership was passed to Textile Exchange in 2011. The GRS is intended for use with any product that contains at least 20% GRS certified recycled material; final products carrying the GRS logo must contain at least 50% GRS certified recycled material.
Thomas Kiebler, global application engineer leader at W. L. Gore & Associates, said: “Transparency guides the way the Gore Fabric Division is operating and building trust with buyers, customer, end-users, and partners. Therefore, we decided to become certified according to the Global Recycled Standard to ensure traceability of recycled content used in our products.
“This success was only possible because of huge efforts undertaken by our manufacturing sites and beyond. We conducted pre-audits and implemented the environmental, social and chemical requirements of the standard which have not been covered yet by our existing certifications e.g. bluesign and ISO 14001.
“After having successfully obtaining the GRS certification, we are now embedding the processes and requirements into our existing management system to ensure we maintain the certification and will continuously improve our performance.”
Gore adapted its production and warehouse set-up which allows the separation of GRS from non-GRS certified goods as required by the standard.
By mid-2022, Gore plans to introduce GRS certified laminates to its customers on both the consumer business side and in the GORE-TEX Professional Workwear business. Adaptations of the IT systems will be needed to allow Gore to issue product-related certifications, known as ‘transaction certificates,’ to customers and buyers.
Thomas Kiebler added: “We will introduce a more holistic portfolio management for our GRS certified laminates so that we can continually expand our offering to customers and buyers. We will initially start with a small number of laminates of our Gore Fabrics portfolio, but we will work with our suppliers and manufacturing sites to certify all laminates with recycled textiles according to GRS in the future.”
