Is Your Website Greenwashing?

Greenwashing is the practice of making misleading or unsubstantiated environmental claims about products, services or company practices. It includes vague terms like "eco-friendly" or "green" without scientific evidence, misleading certifications, and cherry-picking positive environmental data while hiding negative impacts.

Two different EU texts are often confused. The one that is law today is Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as the ECGT or Empowering Consumers directive: it was adopted in February 2024, member states had to transpose it by 27 March 2026, and the national rules apply from 27 September 2026. It adds four outright prohibitions to Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, including generic environmental claims without recognised excellence and claims of carbon neutrality based on offsetting. The separate Green Claims Directive, which would have added a prior verification procedure for environmental claims, is still a proposal and is not in force.

Look for vague environmental claims without data, self-created eco-labels, missing links to certifications, and absolute terms like "100% green." Our scanner matches your text against 234 banned or restricted green formulations in 9 EU languages, and reads the substantiation wording around each one. The rules are deterministic: no AI model is involved, so the same page always gives the same reading.

Penalties are set by each EU member state and must be effective, proportionate and dissuasive. The ECGT works by amending the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, whose Article 13 provides for fines: where an infringement is pursued as a widespread one across several member states, the maximum fine must be at least 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the countries concerned. Confiscation of revenues and exclusion from public procurement are often quoted alongside, but they come from the separate Green Claims Directive proposal, which is not in force.

The scanner reads your pages and your published PDF, PowerPoint and Word documents, matches them against 234 banned or restricted green formulations in 9 EU languages, looks for substantiation wording nearby (a certification, a standard, an independent audit, a life cycle assessment) and lowers the risk when it finds one. It returns a 0-100 score, an A-F grade and, for each claim, the wording found, its context, the EU legal reference and a recommended action. It does not judge whether your evidence supports the claim: a human does that.