EU Greenwashing Ban Gets ‘Final Green Light’
Play a dirge for “greenwashing.”
Nebulous and generic marketing claims like “environmentally friendly,” “natural,” “biodegradable,” “eco” and even “climate neutral” will soon be outlawed in the European Union if they’re unaccompanied by substantive evidence that demonstrates them to be true.
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The measure’s “final green light,” as the European Parliament, describes it, was a long time coming. On Wednesday, the bloc officially agreed to protect consumers from misleading commercial practices and help them make better choices, with 593 votes in favor, 21 against and 14 abstentions.
Dubbed the directive on empowering consumers for the green transition, the new rule aims to make product labeling “clearer and more trustworthy,” the world’s largest trading bloc said. As a result, only sustainability labels based on official certification schemes or approved by public authorities will be allowed in the 27-country coalition. Claims that a product has any reduced or positive impact on the environment because of carbon offsetting, which its critics have dubbed ineffectual at best and fraudulent at worst, will also be verboten.
Likewise out: “unfounded” durability claims that flounder under real-world conditions, prompts to replace consumables earlier than necessary and implications that goods are repairable when they’re not. What’s in, instead, will be a heightened focus on product durability, plus the promise of a visible and harmonized label that will spotlight goods with an extended guarantee period.
“This law will change the everyday lives of all Europeans,” said parliamentary rapporteur and Croatian politician Biljana Borzan. “We will step away from throwaway culture, make marketing more transparent and fight premature obsolescence of goods. People will be able to choose products that are more durable, repairable and sustainable thanks to reliable labels and advertisements.”
Critically, companies will no longer be able to “trick” people by saying that “plastic bottles are good because the company planted trees somewhere—or say that something is sustainable without explaining how,” she said. “This is a big win for all of us.”
The move comes amid increasing scrutiny over the preponderance of unreliable information. A 2020 study by the European Commission found that more than 53 percent of the environmental claims propagating across the EU supplied “vague, misleading or unfounded” information about the products’ environmental characteristics. A further 40 percent had nothing to back them up. Almost half of the 230 eco-labels available in the bloc also had weak or non-existent verification procedures.
The directive has sounded the death knell for the in-house eco-designations—think H&M’s “Conscious Choice,” Asos’s “Responsible Edit,” Zalando’s sustainability “flag” and Zara’s “Join Life,” now all defunct—that have quailed under regulatory klieg lights over the past couple of years due to flimsy evidence or bad data. Much of the furor revolved around the Sustainable Apparel Coalition’s Higg Materials Sustainability Index, whose capacity to rate the environmental impacts of materials was repeatedly called into question. The trade group has since washed its hands off consumer-facing labeling altogether.
“The adoption of this directive is a great move, which will make the EU the region with the strictest rules on what claims companies can make to consumers,” said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the Changing Markets Foundation, a watchdog group that has campaigned against greenwashing, including from prominent certification schemes.
“We are especially excited to see the limitations on vague claims, such as carbon neutral and net zero, which were widely used across some of the most climate-unfriendly products and were very confusing to consumers,” she told Sourcing Journal. “Instead of greenwashing, companies will now have to take a holistic approach to their climate and sustainability goals and communicate accordingly.”
This isn’t the final hurdle for the directive. Member states will have two years to adopt the new law in their national legislation, meaning that the earliest it kicks in will be in 2026. How effective it will be, Urbancic said, will depend on how well the rules are implemented and enforced, though she expects the law to impact the market “much faster.” Gucci and Nestle, for example, have dropped carbon-neutral labels following investigations into “dodgy offsets” and homed in on emissions reductions instead, she said.
“I suspect that more companies will follow these first movers very soon,” Urbancic said. “Carbon-neutral products and services went through an interesting cycle: they used to be considered environmentally avant-garde, then they became super widely used greenwashing tool, and now they are finally out of fashion.”
The European Environmental Bureau, a federation of environmental citizens’ groups across the EU, thinks that the directive falls short in at least one regard: a failure to ban early obsolescence, a practice of creating products with a limited life span. While companies will not be able to hawk faulty products to consumers, this will only apply “if they are aware of the problem: a condition that will be difficult to prove in practice,” said Miriam Thiemann, policy officer for sustainable consumption.
“This law cuts through the smoke of misleading green marketing, putting a leash on shady claims and boosting the credibility of sustainability labels,” she said. “People will also have access to more information about the durability and reparability of products before buying them. But we still need stronger rules to make durable, repairable products the norm.“
In a LinkedIn post, George Harding-Rolls, previously campaign manager at the Changing Markets Foundation, now the director of policy and advocacy at the London consultancy Eco-Age, had questions.
“Will companies bother with the burden, or just start greenhushing?“ he asked. “Is a market less saturated with green claims more reflective of the reality of the market’s ability to reduce impact through consumerism alone? Are some certification schemes themselves just another layer of greenwashing?”
