EU to crack down on greenwashing with ‘proportionate’ penalties

theguardian.com:

Companies will have 10 days to justify green claims about their products or face “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” penalties, under a draft EU crackdown on greenwashing seen by the Guardian.

Inflated claims by firms about their products’ environmental bona fides have grown along with public awareness of global heating in recent years.

One EU survey in 2020 found that 53% of environmental product claims were “vague, misleading or unfounded”. Authorities suspected 42% of green product gambits of being “false or deceptive” in another survey the same year.

Greenwashing claims can circulate in a wild west market environment for now but the substantiating green claims directive, due in March, will force firms to comply with a new legal framework.

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) said it strongly supported the plan for beefing up market surveillance authorities to fight greenwash. But “a future EU green claims law will only be as good as its enforcement, said BEUC’s director, Monique Goyens. “Authorities should regularly control green claims, publicly disclose their findings, and be able to fine companies who mislead consumers.”

The leaked directive takes no position on which penalties the EU’s 27 countries should use.

Goyens said phrases such as “climate positive” and “carbon neutral” should be “banned from the market altogether”.

The commission declined to comment on the leaked draft, which says it expects the law to save the equivalent of up to 7m tonnes of CO2 emissions over a 15-year period.

One EU official speaking on condition of anonymity said that, taken with a proposed empowering consumers directive, the green claims law “should clean up the environmental claims marketplace, where it is a bit footloose and