Marketers need to get ready for a post-greenwashing era
Opinion
New EU rules on green claims will set global best practice for how brands communicate their sustainability credentials. Here’s how brands can adapt to win.
Advertising is about to change and sustainability claims will forever be impacted.
New European laws coming into force in 2026 will see the end of woolly descriptors such as “nature-friendly” and “greener”, and in will come specific, provable claims that are more prosaic but also more accurate.
Slogans such as “climate-friendly packaging” may have to be replaced by “100% of energy used to produce this packaging comes from renewable sources”.
The goal is to convince consumers that when brands make green claims, they can be trusted. In short, words on a packet need to be more than just marketing jargon.
That means there won’t be halo “sustainable” products — the new rules will only allow claims to be tied to a particular product or aspect of a product where you can demonstrate environmental benefits.
Additionally, marketers can no longer claim a product has a reduced, neutral or positive environmental impact when it is based on an offsetting scheme.
In short, brands will only be able to make clear and specific environmental claims rather than generic ones. And the data behind these claims will have to be easily accessible — via a QR code or web address, for example.
How brands can win
The new rules introduced by the EU’s Empowering Consumers in the Green Transition Directive (Empco directive), as well as the forthcoming Green Claims Code, will help green claims become the powerful marketing tool they were meant to be in both the EU and beyond.
They address consumer concerns around the quality of green claims, backed by the commission’s 2020 research that found more than half of the environmental claims (53.3%) analysed were vague, misleading or unfounded.
Some may be concerned that these new measures, due to come into force in the second half of 2026, will stop brands from promoting the work they are doing with their supply chains.
UK marketers might also think this doesn’t apply to them — we’ve left the EU, after all — but the UK is on a very similar trajectory, and green claims and product-labelling rules generally remain closely aligned.
In both markets, while I think the number of green claims will fall, at least initially, brands that are doing good work will have more space to celebrate their differences authentically.
Advertisers with a global or pan-European footprint may also look to adopt a standard approach for all European markets including the UK from a strategic, operational and ethical standpoint, rather than taking a disjointed approach.
The bottom line is: those claims that can be made will be more credible to consumers and ultimately more powerful for the businesses that invest in them.
Success in this new era will be about being bold but not claiming perfection. If 90% of your packaging is recycled, that’s still great and worth celebrating.
Key changes that matter
Brands will have to take a new approach before they can celebrate their brilliant work, however. Any claims must be accredited by independent and approved organisations before the ads appear.
In addition, the number of EU eco-labels will be culled in a move designed to give such schemes greater credibility.
These new regulations also matter because they could become the flagbearer for rules regarding green claims globally and, like GDPR, be adapted by other markets. California, for example, is taking action and in the UK the Advertising Standards Authority and Competition & Markets Authority have also been cracking down on misleading environmental product claims.
The risk of reputational damage that comes with being labelled a greenwasher is global and, in the EU, there are financial penalties too. These can reach as high as 4% of a company’s total annual turnover in member state or markets where an offence has been committed.
Actions for UK marketers
Marketers in the UK as well as the EU need to start thinking now about how they might make green claims in the future.
To get ahead of the curve, they should start with three key actions.
Assess: Ask across the business what work is going on that you can celebrate. Find out what proof points you have, or will have, that you can leverage. Discover what third-party verification schemes your company is signed up to.
Policy then marketing: Form a closer relationship with your policy team as they will need to be on board. Also make sure you have processes (and the required training) in place with your creative partners.
Stay up to date: Build links, whether internal or external, that will keep you abreast of all legislation in the EU and the UK as these rules develop over the next year or so. Individual member states have two years to put the rules into force, including naming the eco-labels they plan to approve.
The more you can do ahead of time, the more likely you are able to take advantage. If you have a good story to tell, consumers want to hear it.
What matters is that people will be able to believe what you say because the sustainability playing field will have been cleared of the vague, the overclaims and the falsehoods that are currently making it harder for all of us to do the right thing.
It’s time for green marketing to become the powerhouse for business growth it was always meant to be.
Aina Fuller is sustainability director for marketing and media at Responsible Marketing Agency