Substantiating Environmental Claims

For most of the last decade the constraint on environmental marketing was reputational. A claim that could not be defended attracted criticism rather than enforcement, and the calculation many brands made reflected that.

Directive (EU) 2024/825, amending the consumer protection framework, changes the calculation by making specific practices unfair commercial practices in their own right. The effect is that certain claims are no longer weak; they are prohibited.

What is banned outright

The directive adds several practices to the list that are unfair in all circumstances, meaning no case-by-case assessment of whether consumers were actually misled is required.

The second row has the widest commercial consequence. Offset-based neutrality claims were common, sat on established voluntary market infrastructure, and are now specifically named. Companies with such claims in market need a different formulation rather than better offsets.

What substantiation actually means

Substantiation is frequently read as being able to explain a claim if asked. That is not the standard. It means evidence that somebody outside the company could examine and reach the same conclusion.

• A stated method. Which standard or calculation rule produced the figure, named rather than implied.
• A defined boundary. What is included and excluded, since a claim about part of a life cycle is not a claim about the product.
• Identifiable evidence. Test reports, supplier declarations or certificates that exist and can be produced.
• A named asserting party. Whether the brand or a third party made the assertion, because the two carry different weight.

Why a passport raises the stakes

A passport makes claims machine-readable, comparable and permanent. Each of those properties increases exposure where the underlying evidence is thin.

Machine-readable means an automated comparison across a category is possible, so an outlier figure stands out without anyone investigating. Comparable means a competitor with better evidence can demonstrate the difference. Permanent means a claim made today remains checkable years after the marketing campaign ended.

None of that is an argument against publishing. It is an argument for auditing existing claims against what the passport will disclose, before the two are visible side by side.

The audit worth doing first

Most companies preparing a passport discover that their marketing claims and their product data were assembled by different teams to different standards, and have never been compared.

The third outcome is the most common and the most encouraging: the product genuinely performs as claimed and nobody assembled the file. That is a documentation exercise rather than a reformulation, and it is considerably cheaper to do before publication.

Who enforces this

Enforcement sits with national consumer protection authorities rather than with the market surveillance bodies that police product compliance, which means a passport data problem can produce two separate enforcement conversations with two different regulators.

Competitors are also a route. Unfair commercial practice rules are enforceable through national mechanisms that competitors and consumer organisations can invoke, and a rival with better evidence has both the means and the motive to test a claim that outperforms theirs without support.

That is worth weighing when deciding how aggressive a claim to make. The party most likely to check it is not a regulator conducting a sweep but a competitor who knows the category well enough to recognise a figure that cannot be right.

How to write a claim that holds

The pattern that survives scrutiny is narrow, quantified and attributed. It is less satisfying to write and considerably easier to defend.

Rather than an environmentally friendly jacket, a jacket whose outer fabric is 68 per cent recycled polyester by mass, certified under a named chain-of-custody scheme. The second says less, means something, and can be checked from the passport by anyone who wants to.

That is also the formulation that ages well. A specific evidenced claim remains true as rules tighten, whereas a general claim depends on an interpretation that is currently moving in one direction.