Legal & Regulatory News

EU Commission publishes anti-greenwashing proposal to strengthen consumer protection

On 30 March 2022, the EU Commission published a proposal for a directive on empowering consumers for the green transition (the Proposal) in order to amend the Consumers Rights Directive and Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD).

The main aim of the Proposal is to strengthen consumer protection against greenwashing, and the proposed amendments to the UCPD include a ban on:

• displaying a sustainability label which is not based on a certification scheme or not established by public authorities.
• generic environmental claims used in marketing towards consumers, where the excellent environmental performance of the product or trader cannot be demonstrated in accordance with Regulation (EC) 66/2010 (EU Ecolabel), officially recognised eco-labelling schemes in the Member States, or other applicable Union laws, as relevant to the claim.
• making an environmental claim about the entire product, when it actually concerns only a certain aspect of the product.
• presenting requirements imposed by law on all products within the relevant product category on the Union market as a distinctive feature.
• certain practices related to the early obsolescence of goods advertising benefits for consumers which would be common practice in relevant markets.

Furthermore, the Proposal seeks to regulate the provision of comparability assessment tools so that a trader can only compare products, including through a sustainability information tool, if they provide information about the method of the comparison, the products and suppliers covered, and the measures to keep information up to date.

Click here to view the Proposal.

Click here to view the annex to the Proposal.