In 2024, the EU decreed that environmental claims must be substantiated by factual evidence, with harsh penalties for non-compliance. But, given uneven implementation across member states and the pausing of stricter EU-wide reforms, what is the best way for businesses to manage this risk?
EU cracks down on misleading green claims with tough new rules
Matteo Squeo, founder of The Green Clause and member of the Permanent Delegation of the Court of Justice, the General Court and the EFTA Court, investigates.
The pressure on environmental claims in Europe is no longer theoretical. It is the current operating environment, and the liability exposure it produces now shows up in decisions and fines rather than in projections.
Companies making green statements, on packaging, on products, in corporate communications, are operating inside an enforcement regime that has accelerated sharply in the past eighteen months, even as the legislative instrument once expected to organise the area remains politically suspended.
The legal base is the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, whose article 12 places on traders the burden of substantiating any factual environmental claim on demand before the competent national authority. The architecture is ex post, so there is no pre-marketing clearance, but every claim exposed to examination once it reaches the market.
In 2024 that framework was further strengthened. The Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive added structured conditions for generic environmental claims and extended Annex I of the UCPD to include practices prohibited in all circumstances, most significantly claims of carbon neutrality, reduced impact or climate neutrality where the asserted benefit rests solely on offsetting.
Transposition was required by 27 March 2026, with application from 27 September. The deadline is close, and transposition has been uneven: Italy moved on time with Legislative Decree 30/2026; France's Senate adopted Draft Bill No 118 on 18 February, proposing the most aggressive posture in the bloc, with penalties of up to eighty per cent of the advertising expenditure tied to a misleading claim; Germany completed transposition with publication of the Third Act amending the German Act against Unfair Competition (UWG) in the Bundesgesetzblatt on 19 February 2026,with entry into force scheduled for 27 September 2026 in line with the directive's deadline.
What would have been the third layer is another matter. The Green Claims Directive, proposed by the Commission in March 2023, was designed to shift the regime's logic from ex post substantiation to ex ante verification, requiring pre-market life-cycle assessment and accredited verification before any explicit environmental claim could reach the market.
The standard against which that substantiation would have been judged 'widely recognised scientific evidence' was left vague in the original Commission text and only sharpened during the negotiations, when the Council's general approach defined it as evidence resting on sound methodologies developed in line with best practices of transparency, stakeholder consultation and peer review, or independently peer-reviewed and published in internationally recognised scientific literature. In June 2025 the Commission signalled that withdrawal was under consideration; the dossier has been suspended since.
Suspension, however, is not cancellation, in fact the proposal remains formally on the table, and for companies planning compliance the shadow matters as much as the text: a pre-market regime could still reappear in a form yet to settle. Had it entered into force, the operational consequence would have been immediate.
Verification decentralised at Member State level and served by a finite pool of accredited third-party verifiers, with mutual recognition of certificates across the Union, would still have produced a capacity bottleneck for any explicit environmental claim, and a disproportionate one for operators serving multi-jurisdictional markets.
While the legislative apparatus has paused, enforcement has not. National authorities have been using the tools already in force with a visible acceleration, and the case law of the last twelve months is the real indication of where the regime stands.
In July 2025 the Italian Competition Authority fined SHEIN one million euros over its 'evoluSHEIN by Design' line, confirming that implicit claims conveyed through product-line naming, colour and iconography attract the same substantiation duty as explicit statements, and that operators in sectors whose ordinary activity carries a significant environmental footprint face a heightened duty of diligence.
Through moral suasion the same authority led Acqua Minerale San Benedetto to remove the 'CO2 Impatto Zero' claim from its Ecogreen line, a soft-law outcome with hard-law consequences for a mainstream beverage packaging format. In February 2025 the German Federal Court of Justice ruled against FlixBus in a case that had reached it through a cross-border referral from the Belgian authorities via the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network, holding that generic 'climate-friendly' advertising cannot stand without a transparent and substantiated offsetting architecture.
In the Netherlands, the Rechtbank Amsterdam in Fossielvrij v. KLM held fifteen of nineteen claims raised by the airline to be misleading under the Dutch transposition of the UCPD, treating 'duurzaam' as a descriptor incapable of standing unqualified, an instruction that reaches well beyond aviation.
For companies the picture is anything but clear. Member States are transposing the ECGT on their own terms, and enforcement remains national, so a product cleared in Italy is not automatically cleared in France or anywhere else.
What is missing, and what would actually help, is more granular Commission guidance, with worked examples, capable of producing a single compliance standard across the Union. Until it arrives, companies serving multi-jurisdictional markets are best advised to calibrate substantiation to the most demanding national authority they may face.
