Milan: Green claims stop being a marketing decision and become a legal one on 27 September, when the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive starts applying in every member state and rewrites what a company may print on a package, a website or a shop window.
The directive amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive rather than creating a separate regime, which matters more than it sounds. National consumer authorities already police unfair practices, already issue fines and already order corrections. Folding green claims into that list hands regulators an enforcement machine that exists and works, instead of asking them to build a new one.
Three prohibitions do most of the work. A trader cannot advertise a generic environmental virtue – eco-friendly, climate conscious, gentle on nature – without demonstrated excellence behind it. A trader cannot present a product as carbon neutral, climate neutral or CO2 neutral when the claim rests on offsetting outside the product’s own value chain. And a trader cannot display a sustainability label unless it comes from a certification scheme or a public authority.
That third rule quietly deletes a whole category of self-issued badges. Companies that invented their own leaf-shaped seal, or joined a scheme run by their own trade association, must drop the mark or find genuine third-party certification. Retailers who carry those products share the risk.
The offsetting ban lands hardest. Airlines, fuel retailers, delivery firms and consumer goods brands built a decade of communication on neutrality purchased through forestry and renewable credits. None of that disappears as a business practice, but none of it can appear on the label. Firms may still describe what they fund; they simply cannot convert it into a claim about the product.
No grace period covers stock already on shelves. Packaging printed in 2025 must comply from the same date as packaging printed next week, which is why brand owners spent the spring reprinting rather than arguing. The Commission’s guidance on the directive confirms the scope, and the legal text sits on EUR-Lex.
Transposition ran late in several capitals, and that unevenness will shape the first year. Where a member state missed the 27 March transposition deadline, its authorities enter the enforcement phase without a complete national framework, complainants will lean on the directive’s effect against public bodies, and businesses face a patchwork.
Industry groups argue the rules chill honest communication. A manufacturer that genuinely halved its emissions may now say less, not more, because the evidentiary threshold for saying anything sits high and the downside of getting it wrong is a national enforcement action. Silence becomes the safe option, and consumers learn less about real improvements.
Consumer organisations answer that the old system already produced silence of a different kind. When every product claimed to be green, the word carried no information, and firms that invested in actual improvement competed against firms that invested in adjectives. Stripping out unsubstantiated green claims restores the signal.
The honest test arrives with the first enforcement decisions. If authorities open cases against large advertisers rather than small importers, the directive changes behaviour quickly. If they start with easy targets, brands will read the risk as manageable and the reprinting stops.
