Prato: In the warehouses of this Tuscan textile district there are cartons of jumpers printed with the words eco-friendly, packed in 2024, invoiced to buyers who at the time had every right to expect them to be sellable. On 27 September they become a compliance problem, and the question of whose problem has occupied trading standards officials across the Union for most of the year.
The deadline belongs to the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, known in the acronym-heavy shorthand of the file as EmpCo. It amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive to ban a specific list of environmental marketing techniques rather than leaving them to case-by-case assessment. Generic claims such as environmentally friendly, climate neutral or green, when not supported by recognised excellent environmental performance, are prohibited outright. So is presenting a legally required characteristic as a distinctive feature, and so is advertising carbon neutrality on the basis of offsetting rather than reduction. Sustainability labels must rest on a certification scheme or be established by public authorities.
The legal architecture is not new; it was agreed in 2024 and member states have had a transposition window. What has kept the file alive is the practical question of goods already in the supply chain. A claim printed on packaging cannot be unprinted. A retailer holding two seasons of inventory cannot reprice it as non-compliant without absorbing the loss, and a manufacturer who sold it in good faith under the old rules has no contractual obligation to take it back.
On 30 June the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network published a common understanding on exactly this point. The document does not create an exemption, and officials involved in drafting it are firm that it does not. What it does is set out how national enforcers intend to approach so-called old stock situations, signalling that proportionate use of enforcement discretion is available where a trader can show the goods were placed on the market before the rules bit and is taking concrete steps towards compliance. Traders were told in plain terms to continue prioritising full compliance by 27 September rather than treating the understanding as an extension.
The gap between those two sentences is where the next six months will be litigated. A common understanding within the CPC Network is a coordination instrument, not a legal act. It binds nobody. Twenty-seven authorities with different resources, different consumer-complaint volumes and different appetites for confrontation will apply it differently, and a trader operating in eight markets may find the same carton treated as tolerable in one and actionable in another. That is the recurring weakness of the CPC architecture: it produces convergence of intention faster than convergence of practice.
Small producers carry most of the exposure. A large retailer has a legal department that read the directive in 2024 and changed its artwork accordingly. A supplier in Prato with forty employees, selling through intermediaries into northern European chains, may not have been told which of its claims were about to become unlawful until a buyer forwarded a compliance questionnaire this spring. Relabelling costs are real, disposal is worse, and the residual risk of a fine falls on whoever holds the stock when an inspector arrives.
There is a second act to come. The proposed Green Claims Directive, which would introduce ex-ante substantiation and verification requirements for explicit environmental claims, has had a considerably rougher legislative passage and remains unsettled. EmpCo therefore arrives as the operative rulebook without the verification machinery originally intended to sit alongside it, leaving national authorities to judge substantiation with the tools they already have.
For consumers the practical effect after 27 September should be a shelf with fewer unexplained green adjectives on it. For anyone holding inventory printed before that date, the effect depends on which enforcement authority reads the carton first.
