EU Green Claims Directive FAQ on scope, evidence, labels, offsets, and proposal status

The Green Claims Directive is still a legislative proposal, not an adopted EU directive. The Commission proposed COM(2023) 166 on 22 March 2023, Parliament adopted its first-reading text on 12 March 2024, and the Legislative Observatory procedure file describes the file as awaiting the Council's first-reading position.

Treat obligations in this FAQ as proposal-based unless they are expressly tied to Directive (EU) 2024/825 or the existing Unfair Commercial Practices Directive framework.

An explicit environmental claim is voluntary business-to-consumer wording, oral communication, or other clear statement that says or implies a positive environmental impact, a lower negative impact, no impact, or improvement over time for a product, service, trader, or trader activity.

Examples in the Commission Q&A include recycled-content packaging, bee-friendly juice, carbon-compensated rides, and future CO2-reduction commitments. If more specific EU legislation already sets claim rules for the product or sector, those specific rules take priority.

The proposal expects the trader generating an explicit environmental claim to substantiate it before use with reliable, comparable, verifiable information based on widely recognised scientific evidence. The assessment should identify relevant environmental impacts, consider the life cycle where needed, avoid omitting material trade-offs, and use primary or accurate secondary data at the right level for the claim.

The proposal does not require a full life-cycle assessment for every claim. It does require the evidence method to fit the claim and to avoid moving an impact from one life-cycle stage or environmental category into another without disclosure.

Comparative environmental claims need equivalent information and data. The comparison should use the same function, comparable boundaries, consistent methods and assumptions, and material, relevant, verifiable, representative features.

For claims that compare a new product version with an earlier one, the proposal expects the improvement claim to explain the baseline and whether the improvement worsens other environmental impacts or life-cycle stages.

The proposal treats environmental labels as a subset of environmental claims and targets both labels and labelling schemes. It aims to stop label proliferation by requiring transparency, robustness, third-party verification, regular review, and controls on new public and private schemes.

Under the Commission proposal, new public schemes would generally be developed at EU level, while new private schemes would need to show higher environmental ambition and obtain pre-approval. The Council text keeps the same policy direction but should be checked before relying on a final obligation because the file is still a proposal.

Product claims that a product has a neutral, reduced, or positive greenhouse-gas impact based on offsetting are prohibited under Directive (EU) 2024/825's UCPD blacklist. Examples in the grounding include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, and climate compensated product-style claims where the message is based on offsets outside the product value chain.

For the Green Claims proposal, climate-related claims involving offsets require transparency: emissions offsets should be reported separately from greenhouse gas emissions, the claim should explain which part concerns the trader's own operations or value chain and which part relies on offsets, and offsets need integrity and correct accounting.

PEF and OEF evidence is useful when the claim depends on life-cycle environmental performance for a product or organisation. JRC material describes PEF and OEF as LCA-based methods to measure and communicate potential life-cycle environmental impact, and the Council text recommends Environmental Footprint methods where relevant PEF Category Rules or OEF Sector Rules have been established.

PEF/OEF is not a substitute for claim-specific wording review. Use it to support the impact calculation, functional unit, system boundary, impact categories, data quality, assumptions, limitations, review, and reporting behind a claim.

The UCPD remains the cross-cutting consumer-protection framework for misleading business-to-consumer practices, including environmental claims. Directive (EU) 2024/825 amends the UCPD and Consumer Rights Directive to add specific green-transition protections, including rules on generic environmental claims, future environmental performance claims, sustainability labels, and offset-based product neutrality claims.

The Green Claims proposal is intended to complement that framework by adding more specific rules for substantiation, communication, verification, and environmental labelling schemes for voluntary explicit environmental claims. A claim may still be unfair under the UCPD even if a verifier or trader has assessed Green Claims proposal documentation.

The grounded penalty facts are proposal-stage facts. The Commission proposal would require Member States to lay down effective, proportionate, and dissuasive penalties for national provisions adopted under the directive, and it lists factors for setting penalty levels, including the nature and gravity of the infringement, intent or negligence, mitigation, prior infringements, financial strength, benefits gained, and cross-border penalties.

The Commission proposal also says penalties and measures should include fines, confiscation of revenues gained from transactions with relevant products, and temporary exclusion from public procurement and public funding. For coordinated EU consumer-protection penalties under Regulation (EU) 2017/2394, the proposal refers to maximum fines of at least 4% of annual turnover in the Member State or Member States concerned. The Council general approach keeps Member State penalty-setting but changes parts of the penalty detail, so final penalty exposure should not be stated as settled law.