The EU Green Claims Directive you’ve been reading about isn’t coming into force. But you are not off the hook — a different EU law is, it bans specific things many companies are doing right now, and the deadline is September 2026.
If you’ve spent the past two years monitoring the EU Green Claims Directive and wondering how it would affect your marketing, here’s the update: it’s gone. The European Commission signalled its intention to withdraw the proposal in June 2025, after the European People’s Party withdrew its support over concerns that ex-ante third-party verification requirements were too burdensome for small businesses.
The Directive that was shelved was one piece of EU regulatory architecture. The layer beneath it — the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT, Directive 2024/825) — is already law, already in force, and starts being enforced from 27 September 2026. It bans specific claims your marketing may be making right now. And unlike the GCD, no one is proposing to withdraw it.
This article explains what’s dead, what’s live, and what you need to do before the deadline.
What was the EU Green Claims Directive, and why did it fail?
Proposed by the European Commission in March 2023, the Green Claims Directive was designed to create EU-wide rules requiring science-based substantiation and ex-ante third-party verification for any explicit environmental claim made to consumers. The ambition was significant: companies would have had to verify claims before making them, using independent third parties operating within a harmonised EU framework.
It was also a lex specialis — a more specific law designed to sit on top of existing EU consumer protection rules, adding a rigorous verification layer to environmental claims in particular.
By June 2025, the political coalition needed to pass it had collapsed. The EPP — the largest group in the European Parliament — argued that requiring upfront third-party verification would create compliance burdens disproportionate to the scale of many businesses, particularly SMEs. The Commission moved to withdraw.
The critical point: the GCD was a more specific layer on top of existing law. Its withdrawal removed that layer. The existing law — the consumer protection framework underneath — remains, and has now been strengthened by the ECGT. The death of the GCD didn’t loosen environmental claims rules. In one important respect, it clarified them: the ECGT is what applies, and the ECGT has specific, enforceable bans.
What’s actually law: the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT)
The ECGT (Directive 2024/825) was adopted in February 2024 and entered into force in March 2024. Member states must apply it from 27 September 2026. This timeline is independent of anything that happened to the Green Claims Directive.
The ECGT works primarily by amending two existing pieces of EU consumer law — the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) and the Consumer Rights Directive — to explicitly address environmental claims. Where the GCD would have introduced a new pre-approval framework, the ECGT adds specific prohibited practices to legislation that already has enforcement teeth.
Here are the three headline bans, in plain language.
Ban 1: Generic environmental claims without substantiation or certification
Generic terms like ‘eco-friendly’, ‘green’, ‘natural’, ‘sustainable’, ‘environmentally responsible’, ‘conscious’, and ‘climate friendly’ are now treated as unfair commercial practices unless one of two conditions is met: either the claim is backed by an EU-recognised certification scheme, or the company can demonstrate outstanding verified environmental performance that the claim accurately reflects.
The practical implication is blunter than it sounds. You cannot describe your product as ‘sustainable’ because you’ve made some emissions improvements, offset a portion of your footprint, or hit an internal target. The term must be substantiated at the level that justified using it — which, for generic positive claims, is a high bar that most self-assessment cannot meet. If the substantiation isn’t there, the term has to come off the packaging, the website, and the campaign.
This is not new in spirit — EU courts and national authorities have been applying similar logic under the UCPD for years. The KLM greenwashing case (Dutch court, late 2024), which found that KLM’s claims about sustainable aviation fuel were misleading to consumers, illustrates how existing consumer law was already being applied to environmental claims. The ECGT codifies and sharpens that approach.
Ban 2: Offset-based ‘climate neutral’ product claims
This is the ban that will surprise the most marketing teams, because it explicitly calls out a practice that has been widespread.
The ECGT blacklists any claim that a product has a neutral, reduced, or positive climate impact — where that claim is based on carbon offsetting rather than actual emissions reductions from the product’s life cycle.
That covers:
- ‘Carbon neutral’ product packaging
- ‘Climate positive’ shipping or delivery claims
- ‘Net zero’ product lines where the neutrality is achieved through credit purchases
- Any framing that implies a product’s climate impact is compensated by a separate offsetting programme
A few nuances matter here. The ban is on using offsets as the basis for a product-level climate impact claim directed at consumers. It does not prohibit a company from having an offsetting programme, reporting on it, or describing it accurately in sustainability disclosures. The distinction is between saying ‘we invest in carbon removal projects as part of our climate strategy’ (permitted, if accurate) and ‘this product is carbon neutral’ (banned if the neutrality is achieved through offsets rather than actual emissions reductions).
The German Federal Court of Justice ruling on the use of ‘klimaneutral’ (climate neutral) in consumer advertising — which found that such claims based on offsetting were inherently liable to mislead — anticipated the direction the ECGT has now formalised.
For companies whose net zero and carbon neutral claims have relied on carbon capture and removal mechanisms to offset product-level emissions, this ban requires an immediate review of how those claims are made to consumers.
Ban 3: Unverified sustainability labels
Private sustainability labels — trust marks, eco-seals, leaf icons, internal quality badges — are prohibited unless they meet two cumulative requirements: they must be based on a certification scheme that uses independent third-party verification, and that scheme must be open to any competitor who meets the criteria.
Self-created labels — a company’s own seal-of-approval applied to its products — are out. An internal ‘Eco Choice’ badge or a branded sustainability mark that hasn’t been independently verified is an unfair commercial practice under the ECGT regardless of whether the underlying environmental performance is genuine.
For companies with established internal programmes, this is a significant operational issue. It means either migrating to an external certification framework (B Corp certification, established industry eco-labels, or equivalent schemes monitored by an independent body) or removing the label entirely.
A plain-English checklist: do any of these apply to you?
Before September 2026, you need to review your consumer-facing communications. If any of the following are true, action is required.
You use generic environmental terms without certification. ‘Eco-friendly’, ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘natural’, ‘clean’, or ‘responsible’ applied to your product or service without a recognised certification scheme or documented evidence of exceptional environmental performance.
You make offset-based climate claims. Your product, packaging, service, or delivery is described as ‘carbon neutral’, ‘climate neutral’, ‘CO₂ neutral’, or ‘net zero’ — and that claim is based on purchasing carbon credits rather than actual reductions in the product’s emissions.
You display an unverified sustainability label. You show a proprietary trust mark, eco-seal, or sustainability badge that is not part of an independently verified, publicly open certification scheme.
You make vague future commitments without a verified plan. Statements like ‘we aim to be net zero by 2040’ without a published, third-party-verified implementation plan may fall under ECGT scrutiny depending on how they are presented.
You market to EU consumers from outside the EU. The ECGT applies to commercial practices targeting EU consumers regardless of where the company is based. Non-EU businesses are not exempt.
One important scope clarification: the ECGT applies to B2C commercial practices. B2B communications and CSRD reporting are generally outside its direct scope. However, corporate websites accessible to consumers can be assessed under B2C rules even if nominally directed at investors — a principle that has already been applied in litigation between energy companies in Spain. Treating a corporate ‘sustainability hub’ as categorically B2B communications is a risk worth examining with legal counsel.
The deadline, enforcement, and penalties
Member states must apply the ECGT from 27 September 2026. There is no grandfather clause for existing packaging or materials — the European Commission’s guidance confirms that materials in circulation on that date are subject to the rules.
Enforcement is national rather than EU-level: each member state’s consumer protection authority is responsible for applying the rules within its jurisdiction. The ECGT requires that penalties be ‘effective, proportionate, and dissuasive’, with a minimum penalty of 4% of annual turnover for infringements with a cross-border dimension.
The KLM ruling from a Dutch court in late 2024 is the clearest recent indicator of how enforcement-minded national courts are prepared to be on environmental claims, even before the ECGT applies. Judges found that claims about the climate benefits of sustainable aviation fuel were misleading because they implied a reduction in impact that the evidence didn’t support. That logic maps directly onto the ECGT framework.
The window between now and September 2026 is not long once you account for the time required to audit claims, adjust packaging, retire labels, and brief commercial teams.
What to do next
The practical starting point is an audit of consumer-facing environmental claims — everything on packaging, your website, campaign materials, and product descriptions — measured against the three bans above.
For companies whose current position on net zero targets and climate commitments has generated consumer-facing claims, this is also the moment to review how those commitments translate into marketing language, and whether that language can be substantiated.
Amandla works with climate-focused businesses on exactly this kind of claims review — helping teams understand what language can be defended, what needs to change, and how to communicate a genuine sustainability position without creating legal exposure. If you’d like to start with a review of your current claims language, get in touch.
Related reading: Carbon Capture & Storage: what it is and how it works — including how CCS interacts with carbon removal claims under the ECGT framework.
Leave a Reply