Green Claims Directive vs UK Green Claims Code

The EU proposal covers substantiation and communication of voluntary environmental claims in business-to-consumer commercial practices and is intended as a safety net where EU sector rules do not already regulate the claim, label, assessment, communication, or verification.

The UK approach is guidance, not a standalone statute. The CMA Green Claims Code (published 20 September 2021) helps businesses making environmental claims about goods and services stay on the right side of existing consumer-protection law; it applies to claims aimed at UK consumers across adverts, packaging, and web pages.

Start each claim file with jurisdiction, audience, claim text, product or trader boundary, and whether EU sector-specific rules displace the Green Claims proposal.

The EU item is a Commission proposal, COM(2023)166, under ordinary legislative procedure 2023/0085(COD). The grounding record shows Parliament adopted its first-reading position on 12 March 2024, Council approved a general approach on 17 June 2024, and the procedure was awaiting Council first-reading position in the captured OEIL file.

There is no separate UK Green Claims Act. The Code interprets the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (SI 2008/1277), which prohibit unfair commercial practices, misleading actions, and misleading omissions, and the Competition and Markets Authority is the enforcing authority.

Do not call the EU proposal an adopted directive. Record EU proposal status separately from the UK position, which rests on existing consumer-protection law rather than a dedicated green-claims statute.

EU substantiation is built around recognised scientific evidence, state-of-the-art technical knowledge, lifecycle-relevant impacts, significant aspects, legal-baseline checks, common-practice checks, trade-off analysis, and accurate primary or secondary information.

The UK Code is built on the rule that a claim must not be misleading: businesses must hold evidence to back environmental claims and must not omit or hide information consumers need. It is principle-based guidance with examples and a checklist rather than a prescribed evidence methodology, so an EU substantiation memo does not automatically satisfy the UK misleading-practices test.

For EU claims, the evidence pack should connect each public statement to methods, datasets, lifecycle boundaries, primary or secondary data quality, and any excluded impact with a written justification.

The EU proposal requires communicated claims to cover only assessed and significant impacts, aspects, or performance. Where relevant, claims must explain consumer-use behaviour and provide substantiation information, such as covered product or trader, studies and calculations, standards, certificate, and verifier details.

Under the UK Code, claims must be truthful and clear and must not omit material information, reflecting the CPUT 2008 prohibitions on misleading actions and misleading omissions. The Code expresses this as compliance principles with examples rather than a statutory list of mandatory disclosures.

Do not publish a short green claim without a matching consumer-facing explanation of what the claim covers, what evidence supports it, and where the verifier or certificate information can be found if required.

EU evidence should be retained before publication and be available to substantiate factual claims. The proposal also includes trader review of environmental claims and Commission/member-state monitoring of claims and labelling schemes after adoption.

The UK Code expects businesses to hold substantiation for their claims and be able to back them up, but it is guidance on existing law and does not require a pre-publication certificate or filing. Records are kept to withstand CMA or court scrutiny after the fact, not to obtain prior approval.

Maintain one claim register with jurisdiction-tagged entries: claim text, product or trader boundary, EU source, method, data owner, verifier or certificate, publication surface, date reviewed, and trigger for withdrawal or update.

The EU proposal treats environmental labels as part of the green-claims problem. It targets label proliferation, requires transparency and credibility criteria for labelling schemes, subjects labels to verification, restricts new public schemes, and allows new private schemes only through a validation route showing added value.

The UK Code addresses environmental labels and claims through the same misleading-practices lens, but it does not run an EU-style restriction-and-validation regime for labelling schemes. There is no UK pre-market label-approval step in the Code; a misleading label is challenged as a misleading commercial practice.

Inventory every mark, badge, score, certification, and scheme owner before approving EU-facing green claims, especially where a label implies overall environmental preferability.

The EU materials identify climate-related claims such as climate neutral, carbon neutral, compensated, and net-zero as high-risk. The proposal requires carbon credits or offsets to be treated separately from the trader or product greenhouse gas emissions and to disclose whether credits are reductions or removals, the scheme, registry, share of emissions addressed, and quality safeguards.

The UK route is enforcement of consumer-protection law by the CMA. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA has direct enforcement powers and can impose monetary penalties for consumer-protection infringements, including misleading green claims; offset and carbon-neutral claims are policed as potentially misleading practices rather than under a separate offset rulebook.

For EU-facing climate claims, separate actual lifecycle impact and value-chain reductions from credits or financial contributions, then avoid wording that makes offsetting look like the product itself has no impact.

Use the EU Green Claims proposal track when an EU business-to-consumer explicit environmental claim or environmental label is voluntary, not already governed by a specific EU sector rule, and needs substantiation, communication, label, offset, or verification analysis.

The UK Green Claims Code is a grounded comparator: it shares the EU goal of stopping misleading claims, but it works as guidance on existing consumer-protection law rather than as a new substantiation-and-verification statute, so EU substantiation conclusions still need a separate UK misleading-practices check.

Approve cross-market wording only when the EU source pack and the UK source pack independently support the same claim boundary, evidence, consumer-facing qualification, and review owner.

The EU proposal includes ex-ante third-party verification by an officially accredited independent verifier before the claim is used, with a certificate of conformity recognised across the EU through the Internal Market Information System. Council text also frames verifier assessment as separate from national authority or court assessment under consumer law.

The UK Code has no ex-ante third-party verifier or certificate-of-conformity requirement. A UK claim does not need pre-use certification; instead the business must be able to substantiate it and avoid misleading consumers, with the CMA enforcing after the fact under consumer-protection law and the DMCC Act 2024.

EU claim approval should include verifier selection, independence checks, certificate status, certificate location for consumers or authorities, and an owner for re-verification after claim or evidence changes.