EU Set to Outlaw Misleading Environmental Claims as Parliament Approves Sweeping Directive

The new directive is meant to work together with the green claims directive, currently being discussed at committee stage in Parliament. The upcoming green claims directive will be more specific and elaborate the conditions for using environmental claims in greater detail.

The EU also plans to regulate the use of sustainability labels, the background being the apparent confusion “caused by their proliferation and failure to use comparative data.” Henceforth, only sustainability labels based on official certification schemes or established by public authorities will be allowed in the EU. All others will now pass into obscurity or simply deemed illegal.

The new law also wants to crack down on tall emission claims. The directive will “ban claims that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment because of emissions offsetting schemes.”

Durability too will be back in focus. Another objective of the new law is “making producers and consumers focus more on the durability of goods.” From now on, “guarantee information has to be more visible and a new, harmonised label will be created to give more prominence to goods with an extended guarantee period.”

The statement outlined: “The new rules will also ban unfounded durability claims (for example saying that a washing machine will last for 5,000 washing cycles if this is not true under normal conditions), prompts to replace consumables earlier than strictly necessary (often the case with printer ink, for example), and presenting goods as repairable when they are not.”

Environmental advocacy group ECOS (Environmental Coalition on Standards) described the Directive as the “beginning of the end” for greenwashing in the EU. A statement from ECOS remarked on the clause on emissions: “This is the end of climate neutral flights and bananas – impossible claims that should never have been permitted.” Additionally, companies will have to communicate their plans and have them regularly verified by an independent third-party expert.

The test will lie in implementation. “Enforcement will be the real measure of its success and complementary legislation—such as the Green Claims Directive—is still needed.”

ECOS has argued that the Directive requires companies to provide evidence, but it does not require environmental claims to be verified before they are made (something proposed under the Green Claims Directive). “This would have been an important safeguard. Instead, the burden is placed on government authorities who will have to continue to pour more resources into market surveillance and use penalties to deter companies from making misleading green claims—something that could have been avoided by shifting the burden with mandatory third-party verification.”

That’s not all. “In practice, claims with no evidence will be easy to spot and remove by authorities, but it is unlikely that claims with some substantiation (accurate or misleading) will be checked at all, leaving the door open to more complicated forms of greenwashing. Without the complementary Green Claims Directive, the Empowering Consumers legislation might just miss the mark.”

Margaux Le Gallou, Programme Manager at ECOS, argued: “Today, more than half of green claims are misleading or unverifiable—among them, climate neutrality claims, which are a common form of greenwashing. This directive puts an end to these claims. However, it relies heavily on market surveillance, which we know is lacking, and leaves a lot to the Green Claims Directive, which is unlikely to be adopted under the current legislature. This is good progress, but legislators need to step up regulatory action. No more wild west of green claims—only informed consumers!"