Getting the EU green light or Greenwashing?

As environmental concerns grow within the consumer community and companies want to keep up with the ‘green image’, ‘greenwashing’ is starting to become the achilles heel of the pro-environmental movement. This involves companies falsely advertising or exaggerating their environmentally-friendly claims within their activities. 

The EU completed a sweep of EU-online companies to check their authenticity of their ‘green claims’ in 2020. They found around 42% of cases that were claiming to do something for the environment, were either exaggerated, false or deceptive to their consumers. All of these practices qualified as being ‘unfair commercial practices’ when under the EU rules. From all of those checked, about 59% of all the cases, the trader did not provide enough easily accessible evidence in support of their environmental claim. Globally, this is a huge problem. Focusing on the EU, what is being done to try and prevent this , and to reduce this damaging movement? 

The European Green Deal set up by the EU Comission, is a huge step forward to combat climate change and ensure environmental sustainability. The main aim is to create a climate neutral EU continent by 2050, while halting biodiversity loss. To ensure this, one of the main building blocks that was implemented was the Circular Economy Action Plan, which focuses on promoting circular economy processes and encourages sustainable consumption. However, this doesn’t directly combat greenwashing. For this, the EU updated their consumer agenda. 

The ‘New Consumer Agenda’ was established in 2020 and one main focus is combatting greenwashing by company transparency and internal sustainability. Within this Agenda, one of the key priority areas falls under the Green Transition, where sustainable products and information should be widely available within the EU for consumers. This is to allow consumers to have better information on the companies sustainability of their products and practices, for example with the use of the EU Ecolabel. This also includes a more circular economy approach which is set to be implemented this year, where focus will also be given on promoting repairing and reusing products. However, the Agenda is set out more of a guide for implementation into frameworks. This relies heavily on companies and countries to actively get involved. Luckily, many have stepped up to attempt to implement a similar framework, including the UK and more recently Denmark, establishing and bringing in laws to combat greenwashing. 

What can you do?

Until this Agenda and other policies are fully implemented, you can stay on top of greenwashing by looking for third-party valid certifications, or follow up on what the manufacturer claims to do. 

For further information, check out the EU links below:

 Website screening:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_269

The New Consumer Agenda document:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020DC0696&from=EN 

European Green Deal: 

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en