OEKO-TEX® 2024 — New limit values for STANDARD 100, ORGANIC COTTON, LEATHER STANDARD, ECO PASSPORT, and STeP

This OEKO-TEX® Service GmbH customer-information notice, dated 09 January 2024, announces the OEKO-TEX® Association’s annual update of test criteria, limit values, and requirements across its certification labels for the 2024 cycle. The new limit values come into force on 01 April 2024 after a three-month transition period. The notice is not a contamination measurement study; it documents the textile- and leather-industry standard-setting body’s revised test catalogue. Heavy-metals content in the notice is concentrated in the STeP (Sustainable Textile/Leather Production) Annex 3 Group 11 update for wastewater and sludge testing, which lists per-metal concentration limit values and reporting limits for thirteen metals — antimony, arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium (total), hexavalent chromium, cobalt, copper, nickel, mercury, zinc, manganese, and silver — in industrial textile- and leather-production discharge, and adds the requirement that the same metals be tested in sludge in addition to wastewater (as was the case in edition 01.2022). The remainder of the 2024 update concerns SVHC additions (diphenyl(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl)phosphine oxide, bis(4-chlorophenyl) sulphone, 1,4-dioxane), PFAS scope changes (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances grouped under PFCA-related and PFHxS-related sums, plus the replacement of extractable organic fluorine with total fluorine as the operative PFAS-ban metric), and minor adjustments for phenol, SCCP/MCCP, and glutaraldehyde — none of which concern heavy metals.

Key numbers

STeP Annex 3 Group 11 — wastewater limit values for heavy metals (p. 3–4)

The notice publishes the following per-metal wastewater concentration limit values and reporting limits for the OEKO-TEX® STeP certification. The MRSL (Manufacturing Restricted Substances List) column indicates whether the substance is included in the restricted list either unconditionally (X) or conditionally on the production process ((X)¹).

• Antimony (Sb) — CAS 7440-36-0 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 100 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Arsenic (As) — CAS 7440-38-2 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 50 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Lead (Pb) — CAS 7439-92-1 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 100 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Cadmium (Cd) — CAS 7440-43-9 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 100 µg/L, reporting limit 0.1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Chromium total (Cr) — CAS 7440-47-3 et al. — MRSL: (X)¹ — wastewater limit 200 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)) — CAS 18540-29-9 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 50 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Cobalt (Co) — CAS 7440-48-4 et al. — MRSL: (X)¹ — wastewater limit 50 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Copper (Cu) — CAS 7440-50-8 et al. — MRSL: (X)¹ — wastewater limit 1,000 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Nickel (Ni) — CAS 7440-02-0 et al. — MRSL: (X)¹ — wastewater limit 200 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Mercury (Hg) — CAS 7439-97-6 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 10 µg/L, reporting limit 0.05 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 0.2 mg/kg.
• Zinc (Zn) — CAS 7440-66-6 et al. — MRSL: (X)¹ — wastewater limit 5,000 µg/L, reporting limit 5 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Manganese (Mn) — CAS 7439-96-5 et al. — MRSL: (X)¹ — no wastewater limit value published (entry ”–”), reporting limit 1 µg/L; no sludge limit value (entry ”–”), reporting limit 2 mg/kg.
• Silver (Ag) — CAS 7440-22-4 et al. — MRSL: X — wastewater limit 100 µg/L, reporting limit 1 µg/L; sludge: testing required, reporting limit 2 mg/kg.

The notice also states (p. 4) that “in addition to the testing of group 1, 7 and 12, also group ‘11. heavy metals and their compounds’ shall be tested in sludge (as it was in edition 01.2022)” — i.e., sludge testing for the Group 11 heavy metals is reinstated for the 2024 cycle.

Non-heavy-metal 2024 changes (recorded for context; not HMI-actionable)

The notice also publishes the following 2024 changes that do not concern heavy metals; recorded here for completeness because the document’s HMI relevance is bounded by what it does and does not change in the heavy-metals scope:

• New SVHC additions to STANDARD 100, LEATHER STANDARD, ORGANIC COTTON, and ECO PASSPORT (p. 1): diphenyl(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl)phosphine oxide (CAS 75980-60-8) at 1,000 mg/kg across all four labels; bis(4-chlorophenyl) sulphone (CAS 80-07-9) at 1,000 mg/kg across all four labels; 1,4-dioxane (CAS 123-91-1) at 10 mg/kg in STANDARD 100, LEATHER STANDARD, and ORGANIC COTTON and 100 mg/kg in ECO PASSPORT.
• PFAS changes (p. 2): PFCA related substances sum limit of 260 µg/kg across all four labels; perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS) related substances and salts sum limit of 25 µg/kg across all four labels. From 01.01.2024, total fluorine (TF) replaces the prior extractable organic fluorine (EOF) limit value for “a more effective ban of intentional use of PFAS”; the TF limit is set at 100 mg/kg for all product classes, with personal protective equipment (PPE) granted an exception to the total-fluorine content limit.
• Other 2024 changes (p. 2): phenol limit value of 100 mg/kg added for all LEATHER STANDARD product classes; SCCP & MCCP sum limit value decreased to 50 mg/kg for all LEATHER STANDARD product classes; glutaraldehyde limit value removed from STANDARD 100 “as it was not relevant for samples tested under the STANDARD 100.”

Methods (brief)

The document is a customer-information notice publishing the OEKO-TEX Association’s revised test criteria for its certification labels. No primary analytical work is reported. The notice does not describe analytical instrumentation, sample preparation, digestion methods, reference materials, or quality-control procedures for the metals it lists; those operational details live in the underlying STANDARD 100, LEATHER STANDARD, ORGANIC COTTON, ECO PASSPORT, and STeP standards documents and in the OEKO-TEX test institutes’ internal procedures, which this customer notice points to but does not reproduce. The CAS-number assignments include the “et al.” qualifier on each entry, indicating that the limit values apply to the named element and its compounds collectively rather than to a single named species; this is consistent with how OEKO-TEX expresses elemental content/release limits across its certification labels. Speciation is reported separately only for chromium, where Cr (total) and Cr(VI) (hexavalent) carry distinct wastewater limit values (200 µg/L and 50 µg/L respectively). Mercury is reported as total Hg in wastewater without methylmercury speciation, consistent with industrial-wastewater regulatory practice. The notice is silent on arsenic speciation; the As(7440-38-2) entry covers arsenic and its compounds without distinguishing inorganic versus total or organic species.

Implications

• Regulatory/industry-standard context (textile- and leather-derived children’s articles). OEKO-TEX certification is one of the principal industry-ecolabel standards covering textile and leather production; ECHA’s 2023 CMR-childcare-articles investigation report (echa2023-cmr-childcare-articles) lists OEKO-TEX alongside EU Ecolabel for textiles and shoes for children, GOTS, Blue Angel, Bluesign, and Nordic Swan as ecolabel-class standards consulted in deriving its proposed REACH Article 68(2) restriction scope. For HMI children’s-product categories that are textile- or leather-based (infant clothing, blankets and sleep sacks, bibs, fabric-contact products), this notice records the OEKO-TEX Association’s 2024 standard position on heavy metals in industrial wastewater and sludge from the production processes that produce those materials. The OEKO-TEX limits are not consumer-product contamination limits and do not substitute for the EU Toy Safety Directive (TSD), the REACH childcare-articles restriction process, the German Product Safety Act, or any government regulation; they are the certification-body limit values that audited textile and leather mills agree to meet to retain OEKO-TEX-certified status.

• STeP wastewater/sludge metals scope (HMI-relevant). The STeP Annex 3 Group 11 list publishes per-metal wastewater concentration limit values for thirteen metals in textile/leather-production discharge and requires the same metals be tested in sludge. Of these thirteen, eight overlap the HMI ten-analyte vocabulary directly — Pb, Cd, total As (no speciation), Sb, total Cr, Cr(VI), Ni, and total Hg — while Co, Cu, Zn, Mn, and Ag fall outside the HMI Cochrane ten but inside the broader environmental-metals scope. The wastewater limit values are expressed in µg/L (production-effluent concentration), not in finished-product µg/kg, and so do not feed ingredient contamination_profile data. They are recorded here as a regulatory-context anchor for any future HMI work on the upstream supply-chain platform (textile mill, leather tannery, dye house) that produces children’s textile articles.

• App. Not directly relevant to consumer-facing ingredient or product contamination data, because the notice publishes wastewater and sludge limits for industrial textile production, not finished-product contamination values. Relevant to a future supply-chain transparency surface that maps which industry-ecolabel certifications a textile-based children’s product carries and what each certification’s heavy-metals limit framework covers.

• Courses. Suitable for a regulatory-context module covering the distinction between government regulations (TSD, REACH, CPSC), industry ecolabels (OEKO-TEX, GOTS, Blue Angel), and brand-private certifications. The 2024 update is also a worked example of the annual standard-setting cycle a certification body runs: new SVHCs are added when CAS-number-identified substances of concern accumulate, scope changes are made when the operative test metric is found insufficient (EOF replaced by total fluorine for PFAS), and limit values are removed when not relevant to the substrate class (glutaraldehyde withdrawn from STANDARD 100). Useful to brand-QA and regulatory-affairs audiences as a reference point for which heavy metals industry-standard certifications actually test for in textile/leather production discharge.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lead
• cadmium
• arsenic-total
• antimony
• chromium
• chromium-hexavalent
• nickel
• mercury-total
• infant-clothing
• blankets-and-sleep-sacks
• bibs
• diapers-and-components
• fabric-contact-products-other
• fabric-contact-combination-products

Verification notes

• Source identification. OEKO-TEX® Service GmbH, “OEKO-TEX® Limit values: New regulations 2024,” customer-information notice dated 09 January 2024, four-page English-language PDF published by OEKO-TEX Service GmbH, Genferstrasse 23, CH-8002 Zurich. No DOI is assigned; OEKO-TEX customer-information notices are industry-association publications, not journal articles.
• Author attribution. No individual authors are credited on the document. Authors field uses the institutional author “OEKO-TEX® Association” rather than individual staff because the notice is issued in the institutional voice of the OEKO-TEX Association via its Zurich-based service entity OEKO-TEX Service GmbH.
• Source-tier rationale. evidence_tier: B per CLAUDE.md Part 13: B-tier covers industry white papers and reputable trade publications. OEKO-TEX is a private international association of independent textile and leather research and test institutes; its certification standards are widely-adopted industry standards but not government regulations. ECHA’s 2023 CMR-childcare-articles investigation report (echa2023-cmr-childcare-articles) lists OEKO-TEX as an ecolabel-class standard alongside EU Ecolabel for textiles and shoes for children, GOTS, Blue Angel, Bluesign, and Nordic Swan, consistent with B-tier industry-standard treatment.
• Source-type rationale. source_type: industry-guidance selected from the existing source_type vocabulary in wiki/sources/. The notice is the OEKO-TEX Association’s formal published guidance to its certified-customer base on the 2024 update of test criteria, limit values, and requirements across its labels. industry-guidance matches better than regulatory because OEKO-TEX is not a government regulator; it matches better than industry-white-paper because the document is a customer-information notice publishing the certification body’s revised test catalogue rather than a research white paper.
• License rationale. OEKO-TEX customer-information notices are publicly distributed by OEKO-TEX Service GmbH at https://www.oeko-tex.com without paywall. Treated as B-tier industry-standard published guidance with attribution; no DOI is assigned.
• Frontmatter metals: field. Selected the eight HMI-vocabulary metals that overlap with the thirteen Group 11 metals in the STeP wastewater/sludge table: Pb, Cd, tAs (total arsenic; the notice does not separate As speciation, so per CLAUDE.md Part 14 the abbreviation is tAs not iAs), Sb (antimony), Cr (total chromium), Cr-VI (hexavalent chromium, reported separately by the notice with a distinct CAS number and a distinct wastewater limit), Ni (nickel), and tHg (total mercury; the notice reports a single “Mercury (Hg)” entry without methylmercury speciation, so per Part 14 the abbreviation is tHg not MeHg). The remaining five metals in the notice’s Group 11 table — cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), and silver (Ag) — are present in the document but fall outside the HMI Cochrane ten-analyte vocabulary; they are recorded in the body Key numbers section but are not included in metals: frontmatter. The HMI metals taxonomy snapshot (2026-05-18) lists cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese, and silver as metal page slugs, so a future scope-extension pass could route this source to those metal pages; not done here because the HMI ingest scope is the Cochrane ten.
• Frontmatter ingredients: [] is correct — the notice is a textile/leather industry-standard publication; no food ingredients are involved.
• Frontmatter matrices: [] is correct — no primary measurements are reported in any food or biological matrix. The wastewater (µg/L) and sludge (mg/kg) limit values are industrial-discharge concentration ceilings, not measurements of contamination in finished consumer products, and so do not populate the HMI matrices vocabulary (rice, infant-formula, fish, etc.). Matches the matrices-empty handling of the analogous regulatory-context source bfr2009-lead-cadmium-toys and the analogous industry/agency report echa2023-cmr-childcare-articles.
• Frontmatter products: field. Six product slugs selected from the 2026-05-18 taxonomy snapshot that best match the textile/leather scope of the OEKO-TEX certification system as applied to children’s articles: infant-clothing (textile garments worn next to skin, the primary STANDARD 100 use case for children’s articles), blankets-and-sleep-sacks (textile children’s bedding), bibs (textile children’s feeding accessories), diapers-and-components (some textile diaper components fall under STANDARD 100), fabric-contact-products-other (the umbrella product slug for other children’s-fabric articles not in the prior four), and fabric-contact-combination-products (children’s articles combining fabric with other materials such as plastic clasps, snaps, or zippers — directly relevant to the folder context “Fasteners, Snaps, Zippers”). The notice is broadly an industry-standard publication about textile/leather production; product slugs are not over-narrowed to specific textile-form sub-categories (period underwear reusable garments, infant clothing children’s pyjamas, etc.) that the notice does not separately analyse. The route kind is regulatory_context rather than direct_evidence because the notice publishes industry-standard limit values for production discharge, not contamination measurements of finished children’s textile products.
• Frontmatter jurisdictions: field. [INT, EU, CH]: OEKO-TEX is an international association headquartered in Zurich (CH) with member institutes across the EU and globally; its certification labels are issued internationally. INT captures the international scope; EU and CH capture the principal regulatory and headquarters jurisdictions the notice references. No country-specific code applies because the OEKO-TEX certifications are not national regulations.
• Brand-firewall (Part 12, strict reading locked 2026-05-17). Not applicable. The notice names no brands and discusses no brand-attributed contamination data; it is the OEKO-TEX Association’s own standard-setting publication. The OEKO-TEX label names (STANDARD 100, ORGANIC COTTON, LEATHER STANDARD, ECO PASSPORT, STeP) are certification-label names, not brand names, and are the subject of the publication itself; no Part 12 conflict arises.
• Wiki/HMTc firewall (Part 2). The Implications section reports the OEKO-TEX Association’s own published 2024 limit values as the notice’s findings, not as wiki endorsements. The notice’s limit values are an industry-standard body’s certification-system positions, and the wiki reports them as such; no HMTc threshold is endorsed or critiqued, and no synthesis claim (“the literature consensus is…”) is added on the wiki side. The notice itself does not propose any HMTc-style consumer-protection threshold and the source page does not add one.
• Speciation flag. Arsenic: the notice reports a single “Arsenic (As)” entry with CAS 7440-38-2 et al. and does not separate inorganic from organic species, so the metals frontmatter uses tAs not iAs per CLAUDE.md Part 14. Chromium: the notice reports a “Chromium (Cr)” total entry (CAS 7440-47-3 et al.) and a separate “Cr(VI)” entry (CAS 18540-29-9 et al.) with distinct wastewater limit values (200 µg/L and 50 µg/L respectively); the metals frontmatter records both Cr and Cr-VI. Mercury: the notice reports a single “Mercury (Hg)” entry (CAS 7439-97-6 et al.) without methylmercury speciation, so the metals frontmatter uses tHg not MeHg.
• Date and unit conventions. All values reported in the notice’s native units: µg/L for wastewater concentration and reporting limits, mg/kg for sludge reporting limits and for the SVHC/PFAS/other-substance content limits across the four certification labels. No unit conversion was performed. The “et al.” qualifier on each CAS number (e.g., “7440-36-0 et al.”) is preserved verbatim from the notice and reflects OEKO-TEX’s convention that the limit value applies to the named element and its compounds collectively.
• Manganese entry. The notice’s Group 11 table records manganese with a wastewater “Limit Values [µg/l]” entry of ”–” (no published limit) and a wastewater reporting limit of 1 µg/L, and similarly no published sludge limit but a sludge reporting limit of 2 mg/kg. The Key numbers section preserves this verbatim; manganese is on the MRSL conditionally ((X)¹) but the certification does not publish a numeric wastewater or sludge limit value for it in this 2024 update.
• Folder context vs paper scope. The PDF lives under _extracted_infantdurable_05_Regulatory_ASTM_OEKOTEX_REACH/05_Regulatory_ASTM_OEKOTEX_REACH/ in the Kimi corruption-issue raw tree, with neighbouring documents in ASTM and REACH regulatory scope. The folder name reflects the Kimi-agent’s batch-organization scheme aggregating regulatory and industry-standard documents relevant to infant durable goods. The OEKO-TEX notice itself is industry-standard scope across textile and leather production for the OEKO-TEX label family, not infant-durables-specific; the children’s-textile products slugs reflect the HMI scope for which OEKO-TEX is a relevant industry-standard anchor, not a claim that the notice is exclusively about infant durables.
• Near-duplicates. None identified. The notice is a stand-alone annual customer-information update; prior-year and subsequent-year OEKO-TEX limit-value updates are separate documents and not present in the corpus at this writing.
• Raw integrity. raw_sha256 = 5a3a8d1f23ffefe355064418a5f54917d4185faa96fcf578e97dc0fae9483d06 verified by shasum -a 256 against the file at raw_path.

Page history

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