The Organic Content Standard (OCS) aims to increase organic agricultural production. The term “organic” is legally controlled by country. That means that a farm must be certified to its government's standard to sell cotton as organic. Once the cotton leaves the farm, it isn’t covered by the same legal protections. However, a company might choose to use a tool like OCS to keep track of these fibers as they move through the supply chain.
The cotton supply chain is super complex and has its challenges. The OCS tries to help strengthen companies’ claims that the products they sell contain organically grown fibers as companies can only claim that a product contains cotton certified to the OCS if the final product is certified at each step of the supply chain. OCS is owned and managed by Textile Exchange. Learn more here: https://textileexchange.org/organic-cotton-certification
