Directive 2024/825: generic environmental claims become unfair practices from 27 September 2026. The evidence has to exist before the copy does.
A consumer-protection rule can forbid a claim. It cannot inventory every place the claim already lives.
Directive (EU) 2024/825 — empowering consumers for the green transition — amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. Member States were due to transpose it by 27 March 2026. The new rules apply from 27 September 2026.
This is the live EU law on many environmental claims in business-to-consumer commercial practices. It is distinct from the separate, still-unfinished Green Claims Directive. From the application date, generic claims such as “eco-friendly”, “green” or “climate friendly” are prohibited unless the trader can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim — typically an official labelling scheme such as the EU Ecolabel. A claim specified in clear, prominent terms on the same medium is treated differently from a bare generic slogan; it remains subject to the general ban on misleading actions.
The claim in market is the operating test
The Directive also tightens sustainability labels and future-performance claims. Labels that are not based on a certification scheme, or not established by public authorities, are added to the blacklist of unfair practices. Claims that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment based on the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions are prohibited. Claims about future environmental performance need a clear, objective, publicly available and verifiable implementation plan with measurable, time-bound targets.
The same campaign can exist as packaging copy, a product page, a paid ad, a sales script and a retailer listing. If approval lives in a brand guideline and evidence lives in a sustainability slide, nobody can say which claims are live, which are substantiated, and which should already have been withdrawn.
The risk is not only a banned phrase. It is reaching 27 September with a catalogue of claims the organisation cannot locate, evidence or retire.
Where readiness breaks
- Registry: which environmental claims and labels are in use, on which products, pages and markets.
- Evidence: the recognised performance, certification or implementation plan that actually supports each claim — and what happens when it does not.
- Approval: who may put a claim live, who re-validates it after a packaging or website change, and how the trail would look in a consumer-protection file.
These are connected decisions. Treating legal review, brand, e-commerce and product sustainability as separate queues leaves the organisation to hunt for copy under an enforcement letter.
What Ontzi builds
Ontzi turns the obligation into a claim-control operating model. We connect a register of claims to the evidence behind them, put approval in the path to publication, and validate that product and website copy still matches what was approved.
The immediate output is a defensible claim set. The durable value is a repeatable capability: the organisation knows what it says, why it may say it, who signed it off and how to take it down.
The Directive is the prohibition. The operating model is what keeps commercial speech inside it.
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This field note is general information, not legal advice. National transposition, enforcement practice and the interaction with other environmental-claim rules should be checked for each trader.