EU Green Claims Directive Verification and Audit Readiness

Start the audit file at the level of the actual wording shown to consumers. The proposal covers explicit environmental claims in business-to-consumer commercial practices and defines verification as a conformity assessment of whether substantiation and communication meet the directive requirements. A useful dossier therefore has to connect the public claim to the product, service, trader, life-cycle boundary, evidence method, and communication placement.

For each claim, keep the assessment that specifies whether the claim concerns the whole product, part of a product, all activities of a trader, or a specific activity. The proposed substantiation assessment also expects widely recognised scientific evidence, accurate information, relevant international standards where appropriate, significant life-cycle impacts or aspects, primary information where available, and representative secondary information where primary information is not available.

The Commission proposal would require Member States to set up procedures for verifying substantiation and communication before the environmental claim is made public or the environmental label is displayed. The verifier would draw up a certificate of conformity where appropriate, while the certificate would not prevent national authorities or courts from assessing the claim under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive.

A verifier handoff should be more than a folder of studies. Package the claim, the evidence map, the communication materials, the standards or methods relied on, confidentiality limits, and open questions so the verifier can test the relationship between the claim and the evidence without reconstructing the business context from scratch.

Audit readiness depends on being able to trace each public claim back to the evidence that supports it and to the consumer information shown with it. The proposal would require information on the product or trader and on substantiation to be made available with the claim, using a physical form, weblink, QR code, or equivalent. That information would include the environmental aspects, impacts or performance covered, relevant standards where appropriate, underlying studies or calculations, a summary understandable to targeted consumers, and certificate information.

Treat communication consistency as a control, not a copy-editing step. The claim should not become broader in a headline, shorter marketplace field, product badge, or translation than the evidence can support. If the evidence only supports a specific component, geography, time period, recycled-content percentage, use-phase condition, or data source, the public wording and linked explanation should say so.

Labels need their own readiness file because the proposal treats environmental labels and environmental labelling schemes as distinct objects. The Commission proposal would require environmental labels to meet claim substantiation and communication requirements and be subject to verification. It would also set governance requirements for environmental labelling schemes, including transparent ownership, objectives, requirements, monitoring procedures, expert-developed criteria, stakeholder consultation, complaint handling, and non-compliance procedures.

Do not assume that a label, mark, or certificate resolves the substantiation file for every claim around it. Keep the label license or scheme record, the product or trader scope, the criteria version, the verification or certification evidence, and the exact public wording together. For labels already regulated by specific EU rules, such as the EU Ecolabel, document the applicable sector-specific basis instead of forcing the claim through the Green Claims proposal.

The audit file should distinguish current consumer-law discipline from proposed Green Claims duties. The 2016 Commission compliance criteria already support specific, accurate, unambiguous claims backed by scientific evidence and documentation available if challenged. The Green Claims proposal would add more detailed EU-level substantiation, communication, verification, and label-scheme machinery, but the operative dates and final wording depend on the legislative process and national transposition.

Keep draft dates out of public commitments and internal control names. Where the proposal text contains timing markers tied to transposition or entry into force, record the source as proposal-stage and track the institutional version used. If a claim is being prepared now, make the dossier useful under existing UCPD-style evidence expectations while leaving room to update it if the final directive, delegated acts, implementing acts, or Member State procedures change the verifier process or certificate format.