Proposed Green Claims Directive
A 2023 EU proposal that was to require prior substantiation and independent verification of environmental claims, whose withdrawal the Commission announced in June 2025.
An environmental claim such as carbon neutral is hard for a consumer to check, and its falsity is often discovered only after the sale. The proposal sought to require a company to substantiate its claims before publishing them, using recognized methods, and to have them checked by an independent verifier. It complemented the 2024 directive that bans certain generic claims, moving from prohibition to proof. Its compliance cost, judged too heavy, led the Commission to announce its withdrawal, which leaves the field to the 2024 directive and to litigation. For insurance, greenwashing remains a liability and reputational risk, and the abandonment of a substantiation framework makes it harder to assess.
Presented by the Commission in March 2023, the proposal was the subject on June 20, 2025 of an announced intention to withdraw, two days after a letter from the European Parliament's EPP group calling for it; the Commission then clarified that the withdrawal had not yet been formally adopted.
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