Tuesday, 28 March 2023 | The European Commission has tabled a proposal for a Directive aimed at tackling the phenomenon of greenwashing and “misleading environmental claims” to enable consumers to make better informed choices about green products and services. The proposal will now be subject to scrutiny by the European Parliament, which may implement changes before the text is finally assessed by the European Council.
Brussels believes that companies, or at least those committed to improving the environmental sustainability of their products, will benefit from these new rules as they will be more easily recognised and differentiated from other less sustainable companies, which will in turn be rewarded by consumers, while avoiding unfair competition. “In the absence of common standards, an uneven playing field is created in the EU market”, the EU executive points out in the text of the proposal.
According to a Commission study three years ago, more than half of the environmental claims assessed were “vague, misleading or partially unsubstantiated. Forty per cent were completely unfounded. Under the proposal, companies that choose to make an “explicit environmental self-declaration to consumers covering the environmental impacts, aspects or performance of a product, service or the reporting agent itself must meet minimum requirements to substantiate and communicate their claims”. More specifically, Brussels urges that these claims must be independently verified and validated by scientific evidence. These would include claims such as “T-shirt made from recycled plastic bottles”, “manufactured with reduced CO2 emissions” or “contains 30% recycled plastic”.
The proposed directive also aims to combat the proliferation of public and private environmental labels. So far, 230 variants of such labels have been registered, a number that Brussels considers “excessive”. It therefore proposes that no new public labelling schemes should be allowed unless they are developed at EU level. Any new private label would have to demonstrate that it pursues more ambitious environmental objectives than existing schemes and obtain prior approval. Self-declarations already disciplined by existing EU rules, such as the EU Ecolabel, will be excluded from the scope of the future Directive. This will also apply to claims covered by future EU legislation.
When making claims, companies will have to identify the environmental impacts actually relevant to their products, including trade-offs between the various impacts, in order to provide a complete and accurate picture. Brussels wants to prohibit claims or markings that use the total aggregate environmental impact score of the product, unless specifically stated. Comparisons between products or organisations must be based on equivalent information and data.
To avoid a disproportionate impact of the requirements on smaller companies compared to larger ones, micro-enterprises (with less than 10 employees and less than EUR 2 million turnover) will be exempted from the obligations of the proposal, unless they wish to benefit from them. Furthermore, with the adoption of the Greenwashing Directive, environmental self-declarations will be more directly and verifiably subject to the provisions of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, currently under revision.
“In the European Green Pact, the Commission committed itself to ensuring that consumers are empowered to make better informed choices and play an active role in the ecological transition,” Brussels says in the text. “More specifically, the European Green Pact sets out a commitment to tackle false environmental claims by ensuring that shoppers receive reliable, comparable and verifiable information to enable them to make more sustainable choices and reduce the risk of greenwashing. The need to address greenwashing is a priority in both the New Circular Economy Action Plan and the New Consumer Agenda. The recently adopted Green Deal Industry Plan reiterates the need to enable consumers to make choices based on transparent and reliable information on the sustainability, durability and carbon footprint of products, and highlights that market transparency is a tool that facilitates the uptake of technologically and environmentally superior products”.
Despite consumers’ willingness to contribute to a greener and more circular economy in their daily lives, their active and effective role in this green transition is hampered, according to the Commission, by barriers preventing them from making environmentally sustainable consumer choices at the point of sale, a significant lack of trust in the credibility of environmental claims and the proliferation of misleading marketing practices related to the environmental sustainability of products.
Brussels therefore believes that “further EU action in this area will have a positive impact on global value chains involving production processes in third countries. As a result, it will incentivise third country companies to contribute to the green transition, in particular companies trading in the EU internal market. In addition, multilateral cooperation with third countries will be encouraged to ensure a good understanding of the new regulatory framework and its benefits. The sustainable development chapters of the EU’s bilateral and region-to-region trade agreements can create opportunities for cooperation in line with the EU’s overall objectives to enhance the sustainability dimension of its trade policy”.
Source: plasticosycaucho.com
