Certified Content Mass Balance & Claim Reconciliation

How to read this sheet

Two tests are applied and they fail differently. Mass balance asks whether enough certified fibre entered the chain to carry the claimed content out of it, and the answer is a quantity. Chain of custody asks whether every site that handled the material held a scope certificate for it, and the answer is yes or no: one subcontractor outside scope voids the claim entirely rather than reducing it, which is why it is reported separately and why the highest supportable claim falls to zero when it happens. The arithmetic that surprises people is that losses compound. Five stages losing a little each leave 64.48% of what entered, so a claim on the finished goods needs roughly half as much again in fibre as the finished weight suggests - and every document in the building shows one of those two numbers without showing the other. This is a reconciliation aid and not the certifying body's own procedure. Real schemes operate on transaction certificates issued per step between certified sites, with their own rules on administrative tolerance, on whether volume reconciliation runs per order or per period, and on how conversion factors are agreed and evidenced. Where those rules and this sheet disagree, the standard governs. Nor does it model the certified material already in stock from a previous period, the treatment of certified waste recovered and re-entered, or the possibility that a stage's yield differs for certified and conventional runs - the last of which quietly invalidates a single blended yield figure where certified material is run in smaller lots.