From 27 September 2026, the way manufacturers and brands communicate environmental performance to consumers in the EU changes materially. The Empowering Consumers Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/825) bans generic environmental claims that cannot be substantiated, prohibits product-level "carbon neutral" claims based on offsetting, and removes self-declared sustainability labels that lack independent certification. There is no transition period for existing stock, so packaging, advertising, and product pages already in market must comply on day one.

This guide sets out what the directive requires, who it affects, the enforcement exposure it creates, and what evidence compliance, legal, and sustainability teams need to hold before the application date.

If your organisation makes environmental or sustainability claims on products sold into the EU, you can book a compliance risk assessment to map where those claims sit against the new rules.

Key Takeaways

📌 The Empowering Consumers Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/825) applies across all EU Member States from 27 September 2026, with transposition into national law due 27 March 2026.

⚠️ Generic claims such as "eco-friendly," "green," and "climate friendly" are prohibited unless recognised excellent environmental performance can be demonstrated.

⚠️ Product-level "carbon neutral" and "climate positive" claims based on greenhouse gas offsetting are banned outright, regardless of credit quality.

📌 Sustainability labels are only permitted when based on a certification scheme or established by a public authority, with independent third-party verification.

🏭 Scope is business-to-consumer and extends to non-EU companies selling into the EU. There is no grace period for products already on shelves.

📄 Enforcement runs through the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, so substantiation evidence must be documented, retrievable, and audit-ready.

What the Empowering Consumers Directive Is

The Empowering Consumers Directive, formally Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition, amends two existing EU consumer laws: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) and the Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU). It was adopted on 28 February 2024, published in the Official Journal on 6 March 2024, and entered into force on 26 March 2024. The full text is available on EUR-Lex.

The directive targets greenwashing and early obsolescence. It works by adding specific prohibited practices to the "blacklist" in Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and by strengthening the rules on misleading actions and omissions. Because these practices sit on the blacklist, they are unlawful in all circumstances, with no case-by-case test of consumer harm required.

The regulatory intent mirrors patterns that already drive EU CSRD reporting and product-level sustainability rules: environmental statements must be backed by verifiable evidence rather than marketing language.

How It Relates to the Green Claims Directive

The Empowering Consumers Directive is often confused with the separate proposed Green Claims Directive, which would have required third-party verification of environmental claims before use. That proposal faced significant uncertainty during 2025. The Empowering Consumers Directive is adopted, in force, and applies from September 2026 regardless of what happens to the Green Claims proposal. Treat it as settled law, not a pending measure.

What Changes on 27 September 2026

The directive introduces new prohibitions into the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive's blacklist through Article 1(4) of Directive (EU) 2024/825. It also amends the definitions in Article 2 of that directive to define a "generic environmental claim."

The scale of the problem the directive addresses is documented. A European Commission assessment found that 53% of green claims give vague, misleading or unfounded information and 40% of claims have no supporting evidence, and that around 230 sustainability labels operate in the EU with widely varying transparency. You can review the Commission's summary on its green claims overview.

For manufacturers, this converts a marketing question into a documentation question. Every retained claim needs an evidence trail, which connects directly to the same materials and environmental compliance data your teams already manage.

Which Environmental Claims Are Banned

The directive adds several practices to the Annex I blacklist. The table below summarises the core prohibitions.

Generic Environmental Claims

Terms including "environmentally friendly," "eco," "green," "climate friendly," "carbon friendly," and "biodegradable" are prohibited unless the trader can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim. A generic claim is one made in written or spoken form that is not part of a compliant sustainability label and is not specified clearly on the same medium. A qualified, specific claim on the same packaging or interface can remain permissible.

Offset-Based Carbon Neutral Claims

Claiming that a product has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, when that claim is based on offsetting, is blacklisted. This is unlawful regardless of the quality or certification standard of the credits purchased. Claims tied to genuine reductions inside a company's own value chain are treated differently from offset-based neutrality claims, which links closely to how carbon accounting is evolving toward measured, value-chain data.

Sustainability Labels

From the application date, a sustainability label may only be displayed if it is based on a certification scheme or established by a public authority. Recognised excellent environmental performance can be shown through schemes such as the EU Ecolabel or an EN ISO 14024 Type I label. Self-declared or unverified labels fall outside this and become prohibited.

Four environmental claims banned under the EU Empowering Consumers Directive in 2026

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What Counts as a Substantiated Claim

The directive does not ban environmental communication. It bans unsubstantiated and generic communication. Claims can still be made where they are specific, accurate, and evidenced.

✓ Specific claims about one clearly named attribute, backed by evidence

✓ Claims supported by recognised excellent environmental performance, such as EU Ecolabel or an ISO 14024 Type I scheme

✓ Forward-looking commitments accompanied by a clear, time-bound implementation plan and independent verification

⚠️ Vague terms with no qualifier on the same medium

⚠️ Neutrality claims that depend on offsetting

Life-cycle-based claims remain possible where they rest on solid, product-level data. This is where structured evidence, such as an Environmental Product Declaration or a documented life cycle assessment, becomes the difference between a defensible claim and a prohibited one.

Who Is Affected

The directive governs business-to-consumer commercial practices. It applies to advertising, product packaging, online product information, and other consumer-facing communication. Standalone corporate sustainability or investor reports generally sit outside its scope, but content reused from those reports in consumer advertising is captured.

Critically, the rules apply to companies based outside the EU that sell products to EU consumers. A non-EU manufacturer placing goods on the EU market carries the same obligations as an EU-based one.

The teams most directly affected include:

🏭 Marketing and brand teams that draft product and packaging claims

📄 Legal and general counsel responsible for advertising compliance

📊 Sustainability and ESG leads who own environmental data and labels

🔗 Supply chain and procurement teams that source the underlying evidence

📌 Quality and product compliance teams that maintain the documentation

Because the underlying evidence originates upstream, this is also a supply-chain data challenge, in the same way that ESG data collection across the supply chain already is for regulated substances and materials.

Enforcement and Penalty Exposure

Because the Empowering Consumers Directive operates through the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, enforcement and penalties are set at national level through each Member State's transposition. National consumer protection and market surveillance authorities can act against prohibited claims, and there is no requirement to prove that a specific consumer was harmed for a blacklisted practice.

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, as strengthened by the Omnibus Directive (EU) 2019/2161, requires Member States to provide for effective, proportionate, and dissuasive penalties. For widespread cross-border infringements coordinated under EU consumer protection rules, maximum fines of at least 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the Member States concerned apply, with a fallback of at least 2 million euros where turnover information is unavailable. Exact penalties vary by national transposition and should be confirmed against the applicable Member State law.

Beyond fines, exposure includes corrective orders, removal of non-compliant claims, reputational damage, and civil action by competitors, which has already produced a body of greenwashing case law in several Member States. Staying audit-ready across frameworks is the practical defence, because the burden falls on the trader to evidence the claim.

Compliance timeline for the EU Empowering Consumers Directive leading to September 2026

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What This Means Across the Business

The directive turns environmental claims into a cross-functional evidence obligation. The implications differ by role.

• CEO and Board: Greenwashing exposure becomes a governance and brand-integrity issue with quantifiable penalty risk in a major market.

• CFO: Turnover-linked fines in cross-border cases, plus the cost of reworking packaging and claims, warrant early budgeting.

• Legal and General Counsel: Every retained claim needs a defensible evidence file, since the practices are blacklisted and enforced without a harm test.

• Sustainability and ESG: Labels and neutrality claims must be reassessed, and value-chain reductions distinguished from offsetting.

• Supply Chain and Procurement: The substantiating data (recycled content, material origin, test results) sits with suppliers and must be collected and verified.

• Quality and Product Compliance: Documentation must be current, version-controlled, and retrievable on request.

This overlaps with adjacent EU measures such as the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, where product claims and substantiation increasingly converge with the Digital Product Passport.

How to Prepare Before the Deadline

A structured readiness exercise before 27 September 2026 reduces last-minute disruption.

📌 Inventory every consumer-facing claim. Audit packaging, websites, and advertising for environmental and sustainability language across all EU markets.

⚠️ Flag high-risk claims first. Prioritise generic terms, "carbon neutral" and offset-based claims, and self-declared labels.

📄 Assemble the evidence file per claim. For each retained claim, identify the specific supporting data and where it lives.

🔗 Trace evidence to source. Confirm that supplier data behind recycled-content, origin, or performance claims is documented and verifiable.

📊 Reassess all labels. Retain only labels based on a certification scheme or public authority with third-party verification.

🏭 Rework or retire non-compliant claims. Replace vague claims with specific, qualified statements, or remove them.

📌 Establish ongoing control. Put change management in place so new claims are checked before publication.

The European Commission has published a FAQ interpreting the directive (first issued in late 2025 and updated in 2026). It is not legally binding, but national authorities and courts use it, so align your interpretation with it. The European Commission FAQ is a useful reference point during preparation.

Substantiation as a Data and Evidence Problem

The recurring failure mode with the Empowering Consumers Directive is not the wording of a claim. It is the inability to produce the evidence behind it when an authority, a competitor, or a customer asks. That is a data-management problem, and it is where a compliance system of record matters.

Certivo functions as a centralised compliance data backbone that connects product claims to the underlying evidence: material declarations, certificates, test reports, and supplier data mapped at the bill-of-materials level. Rather than chasing substantiation across spreadsheets and inboxes when a claim is challenged, teams can retrieve the supporting evidence with its source and date intact. This supports the shift from reactive response to proactive compliance risk management.

CORA, Certivo's regulatory intelligence layer, helps teams parse supplier documents, validate certificates, and surface where evidence is missing or outdated before a claim is published. Combined with automated supplier data collection, this reduces the time and uncertainty involved in defending an environmental claim. Certivo does not remove legal risk or make any organisation audit-proof, but it does make claims easier to substantiate and evidence faster to produce, which is the core requirement the directive creates. For a broader view of why this is a supply-chain issue, see why ESG failure is a supply-chain risk.

Substantiating environmental claims is ultimately about evidence you can retrieve on demand. To assess where your current claims sit against the Empowering Consumers Directive and where the supporting evidence lives, request a compliance review with a Certivo specialist.