EU Green Claims Directive How should teams handle comparative environmental claims?

Start by identifying the comparison being made: product against product, trader against trader, current version against an older version, or a claim against a market alternative. Then check whether the evidence uses an equivalent basis on both sides. The Green Claims proposal adds comparative-claim requirements on top of the general substantiation rules: equivalent information, equivalent data generation or sourcing, equivalent value-chain coverage, equivalent environmental impact coverage, and equivalent assumptions.

A claim should not compare a narrow measurement on one side with a broader measurement on the other. For example, a climate comparison that counts only direct impacts for one trader but direct and indirect impacts for another is not a reliable like-for-like comparison. A life-cycle comparison that excludes a material stage for one product also needs to be treated as misleading unless the limitation is justified and transparent.

For product comparisons, define the function being compared before looking at the environmental metric. The older UCPD compliance criteria for environmental claims already warn that comparative advertising should compare products serving the same function and should use the same methods and assumptions. That remains a practical screen for Green Claims work: if the products are not substitutable for the consumer purpose claimed, the environmental comparison can be technically precise but still commercially misleading.

For company or trader comparisons, avoid comparing different organisational boundaries. A trader-level claim such as 'lower emissions than competitors' needs a clear boundary for operations, value-chain categories, geography, time period, and data quality. If the evidence only supports a product-line, facility, market, or activity-level result, the public wording should stay at that narrower level.

The substantiation file should let a reviewer reconstruct the comparison without guessing. Keep the claim text, the comparison set, the method, the data sources, the calculations, the assumptions, the boundary choices, and the consumer-facing explanation together. If the claim is about an improvement against an older product or a trader no longer active in the market, the Green Claims proposal expects the substantiation to explain effects on other relevant environmental impacts and to state the baseline year.

Do not rely on a simplified substantiation path for comparative claims. The Council text treats comparative explicit environmental claims as more complex and says the simplified procedure should not apply to them. That means the evidence standard should be closer to a full substantiation file, with verification planning where the proposal requires it, rather than a light self-declaration.

The Green Claims proposal is designed to complement the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive framework rather than replace it. Directive (EU) 2024/825, the Empowering Consumers directive, amends the UCPD to target misleading environmental claims, sustainability labels, and other green-transition practices. So a comparative claim can fail at two levels: it can lack Green Claims substantiation and it can still be misleading under UCPD presentation rules.

The consumer-facing presentation matters as much as the back-end calculation. A qualified claim such as '30 percent lower use-phase electricity than our 2021 model under test method X' is easier to support than a broad 'greener than competitors' message. The public wording should show the metric, basis, period, limitation, and where the substantiation can be found. If those qualifiers would make the headline materially different, the unqualified headline is the risk.