EU Green Claims Directive proposal Applicability Test

The first screen is whether the statement is an explicit environmental claim: written or oral environmental wording, including audiovisual media, that is made voluntarily. Packaging copy, a product page, a sales script, an advert, or a public company claim can all be relevant if they communicate an environmental characteristic to consumers.

Then separate product claims from trader claims. A product claim concerns a product, service, part of a product, use phase, lifecycle stage, or product group. A trader claim concerns the company, organisation, activity, footprint, reduction target, or business practice. The proposal treats both as possible in-scope claims, but the substantiation boundary changes.

The Council text ties the scope to business-to-consumer commercial practices. A claim introduced for the first time towards consumers in the Union, or repeated later by the same trader towards consumers, is treated as generated by that trader. Producers will often be the generator because they control the product characteristics and presentation, but a retailer or distributor can become the generator if it turns a B2B-only claim into a consumer-facing claim.

Exact replication matters. The Council text says the generation rules do not target traders that merely replicate an explicit environmental claim already communicated to consumers, although consumer-protection corrective measures can still affect retailers after misleading practices are established.

An environmental label is not just ordinary claim wording. In the Council text, it is a sustainability label covering only or predominantly environmental characteristics of a product, process, or trader. An environmental labelling scheme is the certification scheme that certifies compliance with requirements and allows the label to be used.

For applicability, ask whether the business is using a label awarded by a scheme, operating a scheme, creating a new public or private scheme, or making a separate explicit environmental claim alongside the label. The proposal assigns scheme-level substantiation to the environmental labelling scheme owner, while a trader awarded a compliant label may be able to display that label without separately going through the claim verification procedure for the label itself.

The proposal is designed as a safety net where environmental claims or labels are not already regulated by more specific EU rules. The Council scope excludes explicit environmental claims, environmental labels, or environmental labelling schemes regulated by or substantiated under listed Union regimes, including the EU Ecolabel, organic production, energy labelling, ecodesign, EMAS, passenger-car fuel economy and CO2 information, batteries, packaging, taxonomy, energy efficiency, financial-services sustainability information, and other Union acts that set conditions for the claim or label.

This exclusion screen should happen before evidence collection. If a sector-specific EU rule already lays down the method, assessment, accounting rule, label condition, or communication requirement, apply that regime first and use the Green Claims proposal only where it does not displace the specific rule.

The Green Claims proposal does not supersede the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. The Council text says Directive 2024/825 amended the UCPD with requirements and prohibitions for environmental claims, and that the Green Claims proposal would complement those rules for explicit environmental claims, environmental labelling schemes, and environmental labels. A claim can still be assessed as unfair under the UCPD even where a verifier certificate or technical documentation exists.

Status also matters. The European Parliament procedure file recorded the file as ordinary legislative procedure 2023/0085(COD), with Parliament's first-reading text adopted on 12 March 2024 and the stage shown as awaiting the Council's first-reading position. Do not present proposal-stage planning assumptions as application dates for an adopted final act.

A useful applicability record is short and binary enough to control publication. It should say whether the item is an explicit environmental claim, an environmental label, both, or neither; whether it is about a product, process, trader, or activity; whether it is consumer-facing in the Union; who generated it; and whether any exclusion applies.

For microenterprises and SMEs, stay close to the source. The Council text includes SME support measures and a later application marker for certain obligations for microenterprises. Unless the available source material includes the final adopted text, avoid converting proposal-stage wording into a definitive exemption.