The EU's Green Claims Ban Starts 27 September 2026: Aligning Marketing Claims With Your ESRS Disclosures

On 27 September 2026, a set of prohibitions on environmental marketing claims starts to apply across the European Union. There is no phase-in, no grandfathering for stock already on shelves, and no exemption for companies that fell out of mandatory CSRD scope after the Omnibus.

For sustainability reporting teams, this is easy to file under "someone else's problem". It is not. The Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition creates a legal test for claims that your marketing colleagues make, and the evidence that will be used to answer that test sits in your sustainability statement. From late September, your ESRS disclosures and your packaging copy become two halves of the same file.

First, the thing everyone gets wrong

There were two EU green claims initiatives. Only one of them became law.

The Green Claims Directive was the ambitious one. It proposed ex-ante substantiation and third-party verification of environmental claims before they could be used. It was never adopted, and the Commission withdrew the proposal in 2025.

The Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (Directive (EU) 2024/825, commonly the "EmpCo Directive" or Green Transition Directive) is the one that survived. It entered into force on 26 March 2024 and works by amending two existing instruments: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) and the Consumer Rights Directive (CRD). It applies from 27 September 2026.

That architecture matters. Because EmpCo works through the UCPD, it inherits the UCPD's enforcement machinery, its national consumer authorities, its penalty regimes, and, in many member states, its private-action routes. It did not need to build an enforcement system, and it does not require anyone to pre-approve your claims. It simply adds items to the list of practices that are unfair, and lets existing regulators act on them.

One complication worth naming. On 28 May 2026 the Commission opened infringement procedures against 20 member states for failing to communicate complete transposition of the Directive. Transposition is patchy. That affects how vigorously any given national authority will enforce, and it affects the availability of specific remedies, but it is not a reason to treat the application date as soft. Confirm the position in each market where you sell.

The six practices that are now banned outright

These are additions to the UCPD "blacklist", practices considered unfair in all circumstances, with no case-by-case balancing and no defence based on consumer sophistication.

1. Generic environmental claims you cannot specify on the spot. A generic claim is one where the specification is not provided in clear and prominent terms on the same medium. The Directive names the offenders explicitly: "environmentally friendly", "eco-friendly", "green", "nature's friend", "ecological", "climate friendly", "gentle on the environment", "carbon friendly", "energy efficient", "biodegradable", "biobased". The only escape is demonstrating recognised excellent environmental performance, a standard that has no settled EU-level guidance and that few products will meet.

The practical test is same-medium specificity. "Climate-friendly packaging" on a label is a problem. "100% of the energy used to produce this packaging comes from renewable sources", on that same label, is not.

2. Sustainability labels that are not properly backed. Displaying a sustainability label that is not based on a qualifying certification scheme or established by a public authority is prohibited. Certification schemes have to meet minimum transparency and credibility requirements. Any label on the market from 27 September 2026 must comply, and there is no transition period. Self-invented in-house eco-badges, the green leaf your design team made in 2019, have to come off.

3. "Carbon neutral" and "net zero" claims built on offsetting. This is the provision with the sharpest reporting implications. Such claims are only permissible where they reflect the actual lifecycle and environmental impact of the product or company, not where they rest on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions outside the product's value chain. You may still communicate about investments in carbon credit projects, but the information must be presented transparently and must not mislead.

Read that carefully. It does not ban carbon credits. It bans using them to manufacture a neutrality claim.

4. Presenting a legal requirement as a distinctive feature. Advertising that a product does not contain a substance already restricted by law for that whole product category in the EU is prohibited. Anything genuinely beyond the mandatory minimum can still be highlighted.

5. Overselling a partial improvement. An environmental claim about a whole product or a whole business, where the improvement relates only to one aspect or to an unrepresentative activity, is prohibited. "We run on renewable energy" while some sites still burn gas. "Recycled packaging" where only the outer carton qualifies.

6. Planned obsolescence practices. Durability-limiting features, false lifespan claims, prompts to replace consumables before they are depleted, presenting an unrepairable product as repairable, framing a functionality update as necessary, and withholding information that an update will degrade performance.

The case-by-case rules, and the one that will catch reporters

Alongside the blacklist, EmpCo amends the UCPD's misleading-practices provisions, which are assessed on the facts. Three changes matter.

Environmental and social characteristics and circularity aspects are added to the list of product features consumers must not be misled about. Social characteristics can extend to fair wages, working conditions, human rights, gender equality and animal welfare.

Comparative environmental claims must now be accompanied by clear information on the comparison method, which products are compared, who supplies them, and how the underlying information is kept current.

And the one to underline: claims about future environmental performance are considered misleading unless substantiated by a publicly accessible, comprehensive and practical implementation plan that has been verified by independent third-party experts.

Every "net zero by 2040" line in a consumer-facing campaign now needs a plan behind it that is published, detailed, and externally verified. That is a materially higher bar than most corporate climate commitments currently clear.

The bridge to your sustainability statement

Here is why this belongs on a reporting team's desk rather than only a marketing lawyer's.

ESRS E1 already produces the evidence file. The standard requires gross Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions to be disclosed separately from any removals, and requires separate disclosure of GHG removals and of carbon credits purchased or planned. That separation was designed to stop netting from obscuring performance. It also happens to be exactly the dataset a consumer authority needs to test an offset-based neutrality claim.

Picture the reconciliation. A regulator opens your sustainability statement, sees a gross emissions curve that is flat or rising, sees a substantial carbon-credit line, and then looks at a product carrying "climate neutral". The Directive's third prohibition is not a difficult argument to run on those facts. Companies that report gross and net properly under ESRS have, in effect, been publishing the substantiation problem for years without anyone joining the two documents up. From 27 September, someone will.

Forward-looking claims map onto ESRS E1-1. The requirement for a publicly accessible, verified implementation plan is close to what a climate transition plan disclosure already asks for: decarbonisation levers, targets, capex alignment, governance approval. Companies with a credible, disclosed E1-1 transition plan are in a much stronger position to keep making forward claims than companies whose commitment exists only in a press release. This is a rare case where a reporting obligation gives you something back.

Value chain claims got harder, not easier. Recycled-content and supplier-level claims connect to ESRS E5 resource inflows and outflows. But Omnibus I introduced a cap on what large reporters can demand from smaller suppliers in their value chain. Substantiating "made from 60% recycled material" to a consumer-law standard requires supplier data that you now have less leverage to compel. The two regimes are pulling in opposite directions and nobody has reconciled them for you.

Falling out of CSRD scope does not help you. Roughly 90% of previously in-scope companies dropped out of mandatory CSRD after the Omnibus. Consumer law does not care. If you sell to EU consumers, EmpCo applies, and you now need substantiation you may no longer be systematically collecting. For some mid-sized companies, the strongest argument for continuing to report voluntarily, on the VSME standard for instance, is no longer investor pressure. It is that the claims file needs a source.

The organisational problem underneath

In most companies the sustainability statement is owned by finance and sustainability, and packaging copy and campaign claims are owned by brand and marketing. The two functions share a coffee machine and nothing else. There is no shared register, no common sign-off, and frequently no awareness in marketing that a disclosed datapoint contradicts a claim in market.

The concrete recommendation is a claims register mapped to disclosed datapoints. One list of every environmental claim in market, by channel and geography. Against each, the ESRS datapoint or other evidence that substantiates it, the substantiation owner, the last review date, and a sign-off. Where a claim cannot be tied to something you have actually disclosed or can produce, it is a claim you are choosing to defend on faith.

A short note on the parts that are not about claims

EmpCo also introduces pre-contractual information duties from the same date: the minimum period for which software updates will be supplied, a reparability score or repair information, environmentally friendly delivery options where available, and information on spare parts and after-sales repair.

It adds two harmonised instruments. A mandatory notice on the legal guarantee of conformity, which is a fixed, non-editable instrument that sellers must display. And the EU GARAN label, reserved for commercial guarantees of durability that are free of charge, cover the entire product, and run for more than two years. Where all three conditions are met simultaneously, the label must be displayed. Vector files for both are available on the Commission's website.

This is not a reporting team's work, but it is worth knowing it exists and confirming someone owns it. In a lot of organisations, nobody does.

What to do before 27 September

1. Inventory the claims. Every environmental claim across packaging, advertising, website, point of sale, social, brand and trading names. Most companies are surprised by the size of this list.
2. Kill or specify the generic terms. Remove "eco-friendly", "green", "sustainable" and their relatives, or add specific substantiating detail on the same medium.
3. Retire unbacked labels. Any self-created or unverified sustainability label must be off the market by 27 September. No transition period.
4. Re-paper offset-based neutrality claims. Reconcile every "carbon neutral" or "net zero" product or company claim against your ESRS E1 gross emissions, removals and carbon credit disclosures. Where the claim depends on credits outside the value chain, it has to change.
5. Check what backs your forward claims. Any future-performance claim in consumer communications needs a published, comprehensive, independently verified implementation plan. If your E1-1 transition plan does not meet that description, either fix the plan or stop making the claim.
6. Build the claims-to-datapoint register, with named owners and sign-off.
7. Brief agencies and retail partners. Your claims travel through media buyers, marketplace listings and retailer marketing. They need the same rules.
8. Decide on remediation for existing packaging. Where non-compliant claims sit on stock already produced, short-term options exist, including covering claims with stickers or adding supplementary information at the point of sale. Decide now rather than in October.

The honest uncertainties

Two things are genuinely unsettled. There is no EU-level guidance on what constitutes "recognised excellent environmental performance", so the escape route from the generic-claims ban is currently untestable. And with 20 member states subject to infringement procedures over transposition, enforcement intensity will vary considerably by market in the first year.

Neither uncertainty makes the date move. The prohibitions are specific enough to plan against, and the highest-risk category, offset-based neutrality claims, is the one where the rule is clearest and where your own sustainability statement is the most readily available evidence.

Start with the claims that your ESRS disclosures already contradict. Those are the ones somebody else can find without asking you a single question.

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This article is general information for reporting and compliance teams, not legal advice. EmpCo is transposed nationally and enforcement practice will differ by member state. Confirm the position for each market in which you sell.