By Sustainability Lens, with quotes from the press release published by the European Commission 22/03/2023
On March 22, the European Commission took another step in its effort to achieve climate neutrality of the EU by 2050. According to the press release, the Commission announced the development of a new proposal for a directive on environmental claims. The proposed directive is based on a 2020 Commission study, which “highlighted that 53.3% of examined environmental claims in the EU were found to be vague, misleading or unfounded and 40% were unsubstantiated. The absence of common rules for companies making voluntary green claims leads to ‘greenwashing’ and creates an uneven playing field in the EU’s market, to the disadvantage of genuinely sustainable companies“.
The new normative act will require all companies, with the exception of micro-enterprises that have less than 10 employees and a turnover that does not exceed 2 million euros, which want to make an environmental statement in relation to their products, to comply with some minimum rules to help justify and communicate this claim.
“The proposal targets explicit claims, such as for example: ‘T-shirt made of recycled plastic bottles’, ‘CO2 compensated delivery’, ‘packaging made of 30% recycled plastic’ or ‘ocean-friendly sunscreen’. It also aims to tackle the proliferation of labels as well as new public and private environmental labels.”
At the same time, through this proposal the Commission wants to increase the level of awareness of environmental labels and their importance, there are currently around 230 different labels. However, the Commission considers that such a large number may cause confusion among consumers. For this reason, the legislative proposal proposes the
implementation of a control system for these labels, allowing the emergence of new public labeling systems, unless they are developed at the EU level. The environmental labeling schemes that will still be allowed to be developed will be required to demonstrate much more ambitious environmental requirements than the existing ones, while also requiring prior approval.
The proposal for a directive can be consulted here.
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