Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/BRUSSLE: Companies in Europe will have 10 days to justify green assert claims of their products and could face “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” penalties under a draft European Union (EU) crackdown on greenwashing.
According to The Guardian, inflated claims by firms about their own products’ environmental bona fides have grown along with public awareness of world heating in recent years.
One European Union survey in 2020 found that 53 per cent of environmental product claims were “vague, misleading or unfounded.”
Authorities suspected 42 percent of green product gambits of being “false or deceptive” in another survey the same year. Greenwashing claims circulate in a wild west market environment, but now, due in March, the substantiating green claims directive would force firms to comply with the latest legal framework.
The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) said that it strongly supported the scheme for beefing up market surveillance authorities to fight greenwash. But “a future European Union green claims law would only be as good as its enforcement, said BECU’s director, Monique Goyens.
“The draft said that authorities should regularly control green claims, publicly disclose their findings, and should be able to fine companies and industries who mislead consumers.”
The leaked directive does not decide which penalties the European Union’s 27 nations should use.
Goyens said that phrases such as “climate positive” and “carbon neutral” should be “banned from a market altogether”. The commission reduced to comment on the leaked draft, which says it expects the law to protect the equivalent of up to 7m tonnes of CO2 emissions over 15 years.
EU’s stance
One European Union official speaking on condition of anonymity said that taken with the proposed empowering consumers directive, the green claims the law “should clean up an environmental claims marketplace, where it is the bit footloose and fancy-free vis-a-vis what manufacturers say about their products. Those proposals could improve that dramatically.”
