The "Green Claims Directive" most people search for was never adopted — the European Commission announced its intention to withdraw it in June 2025. The binding EU law on environmental claims is Directive (EU) 2024/825, which applies from 27 September 2026 and bans vague claims such as "eco-friendly" or "climate neutral" unless excellent environmental performance can be proven. It does not require third-party verification before you publish a claim.
If you came here to work out what to fix before you publish your next sustainability claim, start by running it through our free claim scanner — it checks wording against the rules below in a couple of minutes, no sign-up needed.
Two directives, one confusing nickname
"Green Claims Directive" gets used loosely for two entirely different pieces of EU law, and mixing them up leads to bad decisions — including, on an earlier version of this page, telling readers to budget for a certification process that no law requires.
The first is Directive (EU) 2024/825, formally "Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition" and usually shortened to ECGT or EmpCo. It was adopted on 28 February 2024. It is real, it is binding, and it works by amending an existing law — the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC — rather than creating a standalone regime.
The second is COM(2023)166, officially the "Directive on the substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims", proposed in March 2023. This is the one that would have introduced mandatory pre-publication verification. It never passed. The Commission announced its intention to withdraw it in June 2025, after member state governments and industry groups pushed back on the administrative burden for smaller businesses. We track the distinction in more detail in our comparison of ECGT and the Green Claims Directive proposal, if you want the article-by-article breakdown.
What Directive (EU) 2024/825 actually changes
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ECGT amends Articles 6 and 7 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and adds new entries to its Annex I — the list of practices that are always considered unfair, no case-by-case test required. Three changes matter most for anyone writing marketing copy.
Generic claims lose their free pass
Terms like "eco-friendly", "green", "sustainable", "climate friendly" or "energy efficient" become prohibited when used without evidence of recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to that specific claim. A vague label on a product page is no longer defensible just because it sounds plausible. We keep a working list of the terms enforcement bodies are flagging in our banned green terms guide.
Carbon-neutral claims built on offsetting
Claims of carbon or climate neutrality that rest on offsetting purchased outside the company's own value chain are banned outright, regardless of how the offsets are certified. If your neutrality claim depends on credits rather than emissions actually avoided or removed within your operations and supply chain, it will not hold up under the amended rules.
Sustainability labels need a real basis
Self-designed labels and logos are banned unless they're based on a certification scheme or established by a public authority. A green leaf icon a marketing team invented in-house no longer counts as a sustainability label, however good the intentions behind it.
The directive also requires clarity on durability and repairability — early obsolescence claims and vague "built to last" language fall under the same scrutiny.
The one thing it does not require
This is the correction worth sitting with: nothing in Directive (EU) 2024/825 creates an ex-ante verification regime. There is no obligation to have an accredited third party sign off on a claim before you use it. The words "ex ante", "verifier" and "independent verification" do not appear anywhere in the directive's operative text, and "accredit" shows up exactly once, in a footnote referencing an existing regulation — not as a duty imposed on traders.
That obligation existed only in Article 10 of the withdrawn COM(2023)166 proposal, which would have required environmental claims to be verified and certified by an accredited verifier before use in commercial communication. Because that proposal was never adopted, no EU-wide pre-publication verification requirement exists today. What the law in force actually asks for is that your claim be accurate and substantiated — which is a documentation and evidence question, not a certification-shopping exercise.
Penalties: what's actually on the books
Article 13 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, as it stands, provides for fines — that is the penalty type it names, and each Member State sets its own ceiling when transposing it domestically. For widespread infringements pursued across borders under Article 21 of Regulation (EU) 2017/2394, the rule is that the maximum fine must be set at no less than 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the Member States concerned. That 4% figure gets misquoted constantly as a universal cap; it is actually a floor on the maximum for a specific category of cross-border cases, and national law can and does go higher.
What the current law does not provide for is confiscation of revenues or exclusion from public procurement and public funding — those sanctions existed only in Article 17 of the withdrawn 2023 proposal, alongside the verification duty in Article 10. We go through the fine mechanics, including how the turnover-based calculation works in practice, in our guide to ECGT penalties and fines.
Does it reach companies outside the EU?
Yes. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive applies to commercial practices directed at consumers in the EU, not to where the trader happens to be incorporated. A company based outside the EU that markets, advertises or sells to EU consumers is making the same claims into the same market as an EU-based competitor, and is judged against the same amended rules once national measures apply.
What about claims you've already published?
There's no transitional carve-out for existing marketing material. Once national implementing measures apply — from 27 September 2026 — a generic claim, an offset-based neutrality statement or a self-invented label that was fine to publish the week before becomes exactly as exposed as a new one. The practical move is to audit what's live now against the three changes above rather than waiting for a specific product refresh cycle to come around. Our ECGT compliance guide walks through that audit step by step, and the ECGT FAQ covers the edge cases — bundled claims, comparative claims, claims made only on packaging — that don't fit neatly into a single article.
Member States had until 27 March 2026 to adopt and publish their own implementing measures, with those measures applying from 27 September 2026. Enforcement in the meantime still runs on the existing Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, which already treats misleading environmental claims as a misleading action — the amendments sharpen the test rather than switching on a regime that wasn't there before.