EU Reverses Course on Sustainable Claims Law, Delaying Progress on Green Standards

The European legislative slowdown on sustainability continues to move forward. On Friday, the European Commission announced that it will withdraw its legislative proposal that was intended to combat the possibility of companies making misleading claims about the environmental qualities of their products.

"In the current context, the Commission intends to withdraw the Green Claims Directive," Maciej Berestecki, EU environment spokesman, told a press conference. This legislative proposal was presented in September 2023 and the body chaired by Ursula von der Leyen has not explained the reasons for this decision or the steps to be taken from now on.

This now-cancelled directive focused on explicit environmental claims, i.e. those expressed in text form or contained on an environmental label, and on environmental labels. The objective of the standard was to establish minimum requirements for the substantiation, communication and verification of environmental claims and labels.

In practice, it was intended to ensure that companies' environmental claims were supported by widely recognized scientific evidence, were meaningful in the product life cycle and were based on accurate primary or secondary information.

The European Commission announced on Friday the withdrawal of the so-called 'Green Claims Directive' 

The freezing of the Green Claims Directive will mean that greenwashing will only be regulated by the Consumer Empowerment Directive, which aims to prevent unfair commercial practices using the banner of sustainability.

For fashion, the Environmental Claims Directive was awaited with great interest, as it would enable common criteria for the environmental sustainability of a product and establish a common language that would offer certainty to both consumers and companies themselves.

Common criteria and certifiers approved by the European Union were, according to many experts and sustainability managers of fashion companies, a necessity for progress in the transformation of the sector. This is why many agents were eagerly awaiting the approval of a directive that would make it possible to standardize the advances in this area that many companies had been making for years.

This decision comes after the Council of the European Union voted last April to postpone some of the sustainable laws affecting companies in various sectors, including fashion.

The main change involves a two-year extension for the entry into force of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (Csrd) for large companies, to which is now added the abolition of the Green Claims Directive.