EU Green Claims Proposal What Counts as a Green Claim

The Council general-approach text defines an explicit environmental claim as an environmental claim made in written form or orally, including through audiovisual media, while excluding environmental labels. That captures text on packaging, product pages, ads, scripts, videos, sales pages, marketplace feeds, sustainability pages, and similar consumer-facing communications when the message says or implies an environmental advantage.

The related Directive (EU) 2024/825 definition is broader: an environmental claim can be any non-mandatory text, pictorial, graphic, or symbolic representation, including labels, brand names, company names, or product names, in a commercial communication. The Green Claims proposal then focuses on the explicit subset for substantiation, communication, and verification rules.

The Commission describes the proposal as targeting voluntary explicit claims made by businesses towards consumers, covering the environmental impacts, aspects, or performance of a product or of the trader itself, and not currently covered by other EU rules. The Council text also confirms that products include services and that service providers can generate claims about themselves or their activities.

That means the same scope test should be applied to product claims, service claims, company-wide claims, activity claims, and claims that repeat a supplier's wording for consumers. A retailer that merely repeats an already consumer-facing claim is different from a trader that introduces a B2B-only claim into consumer communication for the first time.

A statement can be environmental but still fall outside the Green Claims proposal route because another EU act already regulates its substantiation, communication, verification, or label conditions. The Council text gives this as an exclusion for explicit environmental claims, environmental labels, and environmental labelling schemes regulated by specific Union rules.

Directive (EU) 2024/825 also matters before the Green Claims analysis starts. It prohibits or restricts certain consumer-facing practices through the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, including unsupported generic environmental claims, non-certified sustainability labels unless established by public authorities, claims about the whole product or business when only one aspect is covered, and product greenhouse-gas neutrality or reduction claims based on offsetting.

Once a statement is a covered explicit environmental claim, the proposal's evidence burden turns on the exact claim boundary. Article 3 in the Council text requires the assessment to specify whether the claim concerns the whole product, part of a product, certain product aspects, all activities of a trader, or a certain part or aspect of those activities.

The substantiation record should be claim-specific: recognised scientific evidence, accurate information, relevant methods or standards, significant environmental characteristics from a life-cycle perspective, available primary information, representative secondary information where primary information is unavailable, and an explanation that the claim is not merely equivalent to legal requirements.

A claim inventory should capture both obvious and borderline wording. The Commission examples include recycled packaging content, reduced company footprint, and product-linked CO2 emissions reductions. Directive (EU) 2024/825 adds that names, labels, graphics, and brand or product names may be environmental claims when used in commercial communication.

Treat examples as classification prompts, not reusable approved wording. The evidence file still needs to match the exact claim, the exact product or trader scope, the relevant market, and the applicable EU rule pathway.