Cradle to Cradle Silver
What It Means and Why It Matters
What is Cradle to Cradle Silver certification?
Cradle to Cradle Certified is widely regarded as the leading benchmark for sustainable product design. Unlike single-issue certifications, it assesses a product’s full impact across five interconnected performance categories. It provides independent assurance that products are safe in their chemistry, circular in their design, lower in embodied carbon, responsibly produced and aligned with leading global building certification and ESG frameworks.
The Five Categories of Certification
Material Health: Ensuring safer, cleaner ingredients with full ingredient breakdowns for 95% of raw materials, evaluated against strict criteria including the Red List, REACH and WELL.
Product Circularity: Products are designed for disassembly, reuse and refurbishment. This is supported by SAS Recover, which offers a real route for end-of-life take-back and circular processing.
Clean Air & Climate Protection: Focuses on very low VOC emissions, reduced embodied carbon through our Horizon metal ranges and energy and emissions optimisation across our manufacturing facilities.
Water & Soil Stewardship: Strengthening practices to protect local ecosystems and improve water quality.
Social Fairness: Deeper supply chain engagement and ethical standards, meeting UN Guiding Principles and ILO Core Conventions across operations and supply chains.
Why Cradle to Cradle Matters to Your Project
For architects, developers and asset owners, there is a growing pressure to evidence sustainability and reduce whole-life carbon. SAS’ Bridgend facility and the majority of our products are now Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certified Silver to version 5.0, including attainment of the Cradle to Cradle Material Health Certificate.
This means that SAS products support credits and points under BREEAM, LEED, WELL and other global frameworks, simplifying the path to certification. Furthermore, third-party verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) cover more than 85% of our product portfolio, providing reliable data for whole-life carbon assessments and compliance stages.
