Terms of use

Quoting and reuse

Quote it. That is what it is for. You may reproduce passages of text written for this site in reports, submissions, internal memos, teaching material and published articles, on one condition: attribute it to Eco Worldwide and link to the page you took it from.

What you may not do is republish a page or a substantial part of one as your own content, or copy the site’s compiled material — the comparison tables, the assembled registers — as a dataset for redistribution. The value in those is the assembly, and copying the assembly is not quoting.

Figures belong to whoever published them

Almost every number on this site was published by somebody else: a certifying body, a regulator, a study. Those figures are theirs, quoted here for reference with the source named. If you intend to rely on one commercially, take it from the original document — which is linked on every page — and check its version and date. A correct quotation of a superseded document is still the wrong answer.

Trademarks

GOTS, GRS, RCS, OCS, the Materials Matter Standard, Textile Exchange, OEKO-TEX, Cradle to Cradle, bluesign and every other scheme named on this site are the marks of the bodies that own them. They are used here descriptively, to say what each scheme requires. Nothing on this site implies endorsement by, affiliation with, or approval from any of them, and no scheme has any editorial involvement here.

No warranty, and certainly not advice

Pages are written from primary documents and carry the date they were last checked, but standards are revised, regulations are amended and registers change daily. The material is provided as it stands, without warranty that it is current, complete or fit for a particular purpose.

Nothing here is legal advice. Whether a specific claim on your specific product is lawful in your market is a question for a lawyer who has seen your evidence. Reading this site creates no professional relationship of any kind. Paid work, which does create one, is described on the services page and governed by its own written engagement terms rather than by this page.

Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Eco Worldwide is not liable for loss arising from reliance on the free reference material — including lost profit, wasted expenditure, regulatory action or reputational harm. Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Links out

This site links heavily to certifying bodies, regulators and public registers, because naming a source without letting you reach it is not a citation. Those destinations are not under our control and we are not responsible for what they say or do.

Automated access

Crawlers are welcome within the limits set in robots.txt, and a plain-text summary of the site for language models is published at llms.txt. If an AI system uses this material to answer a question, the same condition applies as for anyone else: name Eco Worldwide and link to the page. Automated collection that degrades the service for readers, or that exists to rebuild the compiled tables elsewhere, is not permitted.

Corrections take priority over these terms

If something on this site is wrong, telling us is more useful than any clause above. How that works is set out in the editorial and corrections policy, and reporting an error costs you nothing and obliges you to nothing.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, and the courts of that state have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute — except that if you are a consumer resident in the UK or the EEA, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your own country and may bring proceedings there.

Changes

These terms may be revised. The date above says when the current version took effect, and material changes are described rather than absorbed quietly.